The Furtive Expatriation of Cuban Art:
An Interview with Art Historian, Juan Martinez
by Carmella Guiol
Juan A. Martínez is a professor emeritus in the Department of Art and Art History at Florida International University. An art historian who has taught courses in European and Cuban modern art, he is the author of Cuban Art & National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters 1927-1950, Carlos Enríquez: The Painter of Cuban Ballads, and María Brito, for which he was awarded first place in the Best Arts Book category at the 11th annual International Latin Book Awards. He has received three Ford Foundation Travel Grants, one MacArthur Foundation Grant and a Mellon Research Grant. In 2013, he was named an FIU Top Scholar.
_______
Carmella Guiol: I know that you were born in Cuba. When did you come to Miami?
Juan Martinez: In 1966. I was 15 years old.
CG: And you’ve been here ever since?
JM: Yes. In Florida, but not necessarily Miami.
CG: What made you interested in art history, and specifically Cuban art history?
JM: To be honest, it was by chance. I was in college and couldn’t find a major I liked. I came across a teacher, Robert Thiele, who taught a humanities class that happened to be art history. He turned me on to the subject. Afterward, I was speaking to a friend of mine who had also taken an art history class, and he told me I could major in it. So I kept that in the back of my head. I went to Gainesville for my undergraduate degree in liberal arts, where I took a lot of philosophy and art history classes. I liked art history better, and I decided to get a master’s degree in it at Florida State University. I had no idea, even in grad school, what I would do after I graduated. When I completed my master’s degree in Spanish medieval art and came to Miami, I went to see an exhibition of Cuban art, which I had no knowledge of—Cuban art was never mentioned in my studies. That exhibition opened up this whole world for me. I began to research other exhibitions in Miami and got access to a couple of collections. They opened the Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture back in 1982, and I began to think if I went back to school, that’s what I would want to do my dissertation on. So that’s what I did. My motivation was that I liked it and it was right in my backyard, which was important if I wanted to do research and write.
CG: And you have traveled for your research in Cuba?
JM: Yes, I went back to FSU for my PhD and decided to do my dissertation in Cuban art. Up until that point, I thought that there was enough Cuban art in Miami and the United States that I didn’t have to go to Cuba. But my major professor at FSU thought I had to go to Cuba and see the collection at the Cuban National Museum and do archival work. He was right.
It was 1989, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, when I returned to Cuba for the first time since 1966. Going back to a country that was completely communist was amazing. Every billboard was political. There was no advertising whatsoever. I went to a hotel and I was told, “You have to eat in this hotel. You cannot eat anywhere else.” It was a very strange system. There was no private anything. It was a lesson in living in a country that had a total planned economy and one planned ideology. Everyone was afraid to speak his or her mind. It was very strange. But I did make very good contacts with the Museo Nacional. They opened everything for me from the beginning. And so I started going to Cuba once or twice a year for the next 13 or 14 years to do research.
CG: And did you find that there were other people doing this kind of research?
JM: Not when I went back to Cuba. I studied Cuban modern art of the 1930s and 40s, which is when modern art began in Cuba. In Cuba, there was Ramon Vasquez, curator of the Museo Nacional’s salas moderna, who knew a lot about that time period. Nobody else knew about it in Cuba or the United States. Today, it’s huge. People are doing dissertations on this time period. Auction houses are filled with pieces and there are exhibitions in galleries and museums. But back then there was no interest.
As far as people from Miami going to Cuba to do research on art—no matter what kind— there was a guy from New York who was going to do research on 1980s art. That was it; there was no one from Miami. In fact, back in 1994, when I published my book on the generation of artists from the 1930s, I created quite a few enemies in Miami when people read the acknowledgements and saw I was giving thanks to the Museo Nacional in Cuba and libraries in Cuba. People didn’t think that was a thing to do; it was unacceptable.
CG: Art historians?
JM: There were not many art historians in Miami. Although there were people in general: collectors, intellectuals, art critics, writers of history and Cuban culture, the people who hung around the former Cuban museum here in Miami or the Universal bookstore, the sociology and Spanish teachers at Miami Dade College (where I used to work).
On the other hand, a famous independent Cuban art critic, Gerardo Mosquera, wrote a review about my book and called it a “cultural bridge.” He thought it was great that I gave credit to the University of Miami library and the Cuban National Library, the museum in Miami and in the museum in Havana. He commented that I worked with people on both sides to put it together. I wasn’t thinking about that when I was doing it. I was trying to get help from everybody. But he saw it as cultural bridge.
CG: So you’re saying interest in Cuban art has increased since that time?
JM: Tremendously.
CG: In all of the States? Or Florida in particular?
JM: In all of them. Interest in Cuban art began to increase in the 1990s and then even more after 2000. Sometime in the late 90s, I proposed a conference to the College of Art Association, the biggest association of art historians in the United States, to see who was studying Cuban art. They sent out a call for submissions and around ten or twelve individuals sent in papers. They were working on Cuban poster art, Wifredo Lam, Amelia Pelaez, Ana Mendieta, Victor Patrico Landaluz, and Rita Longa. People were doing this work at universities all over the country: Chicago, California, Texas. I was really impressed by how many people were working on Cuban art.
The interest has only increased. It’s apparent at the auction houses, Christies and Sotheby’s where there was an increasing amount of Cuban artwork starting in the 90s. There is a special section of the auction that focuses on modern Latin American art, and Cuban art was the second most valuable category, right after Mexico. This was the art people were looking at the most, buying the most, and paying the highest prices. Not even Argentina or Brazil were close behind.
CG: There seems to be a fascination between the United States and Cuba. Why do you think there’s that interest?
JM: I think part of it has to do with Cuba being closed to the world for such a long time. It’s this country we know so little about. Americans cannot even travel there. Also, with the collapse of Society Union, Cuba went through a serious depression, as bad, or worse, than the 1930s depression in the United States. Cuba being the last communist government and being geographically close has something to do with it.
In the case of Cuban modern art, there started to be an interest in modern art outside of Europe in the 1990s. We call this “global modernism.” People were beginning to write papers on modern art in Nigeria, Japan, Romania, and Argentina. The height of the modern art period spanned from 1880 to 1940, and the bulk of European art created then was pretty well researched. During that time, there were people from all over living in Paris because it was the art capital of the world. People came to live the bohemian life. Afterward, they went home—to Africa, Asia, Latin America—and kept making and teaching art. People from those countries began to think, “Rather than doing research on Picasso, I’m going to do research on Amelia Pelaez in Cuba, because that’s where I come from.” In academia, there was a growing interest in the modern art from other countries, Latin America in particular. There were British and Latin American art historians writing the history of Mexican muralism, and Argentinian, Brazilian, and Colombian art. It was during that general movement that people began to pay attention to Cuba.
CG: Do you think that this bridge between Florida and Cuba has influenced art on either side?
JM: Let’s talk about the art of the past and the art of the present. With the art of the past, which is what I deal with, the influence can be seen in the huge collections of Cuban art in Miami. When the Cubans went through the “periodo especial,” the depression of 1990s, they were in need of money. At the same time, Cubans in Miami were becoming wealthy and began to collect art. A lot of Cuban modern art from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s came to Miami illegally. Miami is the place to study Cuban art because the big collections of Cuban art are here.
I showed some of that at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. The museum asked me to curate an exhibition back in 2012-13, and I chose 100 iconic pieces of Cuban art that are already in Miami. People were amazed. Even people from Cuba who were traveling through here and came to see the exhibition were amazed. A curator from el Museo Nacional de Cuba, Roberto Cobas, came and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. People came from New York and all over. Florida is now a major repository of Cuban modern art. People who are researching Cuban modern art or making books come to Miami from all over the United States and even Cuba.
As far as contemporary Cuban art, what they call the “1980s generation” of artists is probably the better known of all the generations. They exhibited and were collected all over the world. In the 1990s, about 90% of them came to live in Miami. So there was a presence of living Cuban artists in Miami who influenced the whole city, having exhibitions and so on. Since about 2000, a great many Cuban artists come here all the time. They present their work and talk to other artists. It’s a presence, more than an influence.
CG: These Cuban artists that come here, are they creating art here, too?
JM: Some of them. The ones from the 1980s generation have been creating art here since the 1990s. The ones that pass through oftentimes stay long enough to make art; bring art with them from Cuba; or make it in New York because they have a scholarship or grant and then bring it down to Miami and have an exhibit, show it at a gallery, or leave it with a friend. There is always a large number of Cuban artists passing through Miami.
CG: In contemporary art, have you noticed a change in the style, given that a lot of it is happening here in Miami now? I’m wondering if there’s a difference between the art created here or there in Cuba.
JM: No, not really. The 1980s art in Cuba and Miami was all about Cuba. The 1990s was also all about Cuba. But contemporary art by the people who stayed in Miami hardly makes reference to Cuba anymore. The art by people who pass through only sometimes makes reference to it. With the beginning of the new millennium and because artists travel so much, art now deals with international issues. Artists might make a reference to Cuba, but many don’t. Art is not about nationality anymore.
CG: Obviously we feel a strong Cuban connection in Miami. But I’m wondering – how does this connection manifest in Cuba?
JM: As far as art is concerned, Cuba has not wanted to have any representation of Cuban American artists there. In the 1990s, Cuba began to open to some Cuban American artists, but from other parts of the United States that they thought were “friendly”—not from Miami. More recently, that has been changing. In fact, there’s a curator named Elizabeth Cerejido who has been organizing an exchange this year. She takes Cuban American artists from Miami to Cuba where they have an exhibition and give a talk. Then, she brings artists from Havana to Miami and they exhibit and so on. For the first time, you have artists from Miami going over there, exhibiting their work, and talking about it. I imagine that’s going to increase, but it’s very recent.
CG: And why were they against Cuban American artists from Miami specifically?
JM: The Cuban government in general has difficulty accepting anything from Miami. Miami is the enemy. It’s where all the anti-Cuba politics are. It’s the seed of the traditional exile—all the organizations and the people against the Cuban government are there. In some cases, I think the Cuban government also doesn’t want to accept the success of Cubans in Miami. I don’t want to call it envy. But in Miami, some Cubans have become lawyers and doctors and professors and made a lot of money. They live well and they have taken over the city more or less—the city mayor, the county commissioner, the people in city government are Cubans. The collections of Cuban art here are huge and extremely good. That could not have possibly taken place in Cuba. All of that makes for resentment. But I think all of that is changing. I hope it is.
CG: What are your thoughts on this day, the reopening of the American embassy in Cuba after 54 years?
JM: I think it’s a positive step to begin the process of acceptance. On the part of Cuba, accepting there’s a huge migration and accepting the people who migrated, even the ones who migrated back in the 1960s, who are the ones they have the most problems with. They don’t have a problem with the people who came in the 1990s and 2000s, because they go back all the time. But I think they should accept even the people who came to Miami in the 60s, the traditional exiles. They don’t necessarily have to be enemies.
On the part of the Cubans here, accepting that the revolution will run its course and they’re not going to be the ones who make the changes. It’s been there for 55 years and it has its own dynamism, and it’s going to continue to have its own dynamism. If it’s going to end or not—whatever happens—it’s going to happen from within.
Each should stop trying to change the other, accept differences, and try to have some sort of relationship to begin to know each other better. There’s a lot of suspicion on both sides as to who’s who and who wants what.
I have heard from others—Puerto Ricans, British—who have left their country and then go back that they’re not very well accepted. They’re seen as foreigners. And I have found that to be the case with me in Cuba. They treat me very well, and I have done a lot as far as my research goes. I received nothing but help. But on a personal basis, they let me know that I’m not Cuban.
CG: Were there Cubans doing this kind of work when you started back in 1989?
JM: Not in Cuba. There was a lack of interest because everyone was into contemporary art. There is a professor at the Universidad de l’Habana named Luz Merino who was working with Cuban Republic magazines and illustrations, which is the time period I was working on, 1902-1959. We were working with some of the same artists, too. She was also dealing with the same art history critics from the 20s and 30s and 40s that I was. But no, besides her and Ramon Vasquez at the Museo Nacional, there was no one else.
At one point, when I was writing my second book on Carlos Enriquez, I realized I wanted other voices in my book. I asked a couple of friends at the Universidad de l’Habana to look through their students’ theses and dissertations to see if anyone was working on Carlos Enriquez. Even though he’s a major Cuban artist, no one had done anything, except a biography published in the mid-1980s by a journalist named Juan Sanchez. At one point, I found a paper on Los Onces, which was a group that worked between 1951 and 1954, and then informally all the way to 1963. But that was it.
There was more interest about that period in Miami amongst collectors than there was in Cuba. In Miami, El Museo Cubano de Arte y Cultura/the Cuban Museum of Art and Culture was very popular, and the people who collected art were interested in art up to 1959 because of nostalgia and a Cuban identity tied to the past. They were living in the past, and that’s what they wanted to see and collect and exhibit--La Cuba de ayer, Cuba of yesterday.
CG: Speaking more contemporarily, how do you see Cuban art history and that connection with Miami? You said there’s more collecting, more artists living here?
JM: Yes, and also more people interested in writing about it. For example, Elizabeth Cerejido. She writes about contemporary Cuban art and organizes exchanges. When I taught my class on Cuban art, a class I started in 1995 at Florida International University, it was always filled with people. I started with a class of 30, and by the time I stopped, it was a class of about 60. And I capped it. Who knows how many students would have gotten in there otherwise. I had students from all nationalities and races and a great many Cuban Americans. I also had many students do their theses in Cuban art, and some of them have gone on to pursue graduate study in it. One former student named Asiel Sepulveda at Texas Methodist University in Dallas is doing a dissertation in Cuban art right now. So now there is an interest in Cuban art history in Miami. I saw that again with students at FIU when I organized a class trip to Cuba. I only opened the class to 20, but I had students on long waiting lists.
CG: And you only organized the class trip that the one time?
JM: Yes, only once. It was very difficult to do because FIU didn’t particularly want me to go to Cuba. Afterward, legislation was passed that it made it impossible to use government money to do anything in Cuba. Cuba was also difficult because I had to negotiate for a good six months about what we were going to do when we got over there. The Cuban government wanted to control the whole agenda. I wanted to minimize anything that didn’t have to do with going to museums and attending art lectures. They didn’t want me to lecture. So we negotiated and went half and half. Every day we went somewhere and looked at actual art. I welcomed having Cuban art historians come with us and give us guest lectures, but I also wanted to have part of the day to talk to the students and give them assignments. It was very successful trip. It was the first time that anyone from Florida, much less Miami, took a group of students to Cuba, which was scary and fun at the same time.
CG: Here in Miami, we’ve kind of created our own Cuban culture. I’ve never been to Cuba so I don’t really know what Cuban culture looks like over there, but I have a certain idea of what Cuban culture looks like. So from your experience, what do you think has been lost? What do you think has been kept from that original Cuban culture when it came to Miami?
JM: When Cuban culture came to Miami it froze in time while Cuba continued to change. And then, as Cuba came under the influence of the Soviet Union, Cuban culture changed tremendously. For example, when I first went back to Cuba, I thought, “I’m going to have a Cuban breakfast – café con leche and pan con mantequilla.” But they didn’t have those things. Instead, they had the traditional eastern European breakfast of meat and cheeses. There was no Cuban bread with butter. There were no croquetas. That didn’t exist in 1989. And forget the café con leche. What they had was more like American or European coffee. I never found a decent cup of espresso for the longest time. I don’t think I’ve found it yet.
CG: It existed before and then it disappeared?
JM: It disappeared and then came back in the late 90s, They started opening bakeries that had the Cuban type of bread, and they started to have croquetas and pastelitos de guayaba, things that I didn’t see anywhere between 1989 and 1995.
Also, there was a difference in the words. The vocabulary changed completely; it was almost like an “archaeology of words.” Words that we used in Miami were not used in Cuba, words like chévere and decente. They used new words in Cuba, other words. The first time I read the Granma newspaper [official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party], I couldn’t understand half of what I was reading. They used words I’d never heard of in very complicated ways. They developed their own kind of vocabulary.
CG: So Miami became more Cuban that Cuba?
JM: It became more of a Cuba frozen in time. There were a number of things from the 1940s and 50s you could find in Miami that were discontinued in Cuba. When I went to Cuba in 1988, 1989, there was no sandwich Cubano. It was only in the late 1990s that I start seeing it on menus. Apparently, it disappeared from the 60s all the way to the late 90s, when Cubans from Miami began to go there more and Cuba began to open up and have more tourism because they had no money. The Soviet Union stopped giving them money, and the only thing they could come up with was tourism, so they began to go back to some of the old things people might have expected.
CG: Have you been back recently?
JM: The last time I went back was in November 2013. I had not been there since 2005 or 2006, and the changes were amazing. There were people selling fruits and vegetables in the streets, onion and garlic and all kinds of produce you couldn’t find for a long time in Cuba. Street sellers now have a wide variety of produce that’s locally grown.
And the amount of tourism was insane. At one time, on the Malecon, the boulevard that runs along the ocean, I counted 13 huge, luxury buses full of tourists. The amount of stores was surprising, too. There’s a street called Obispo, and where, before, there were a few restaurants and bookstores and dilapidated stores. Now, there is a hair salon that reminds me of Coral Gables. And there are liquor stores and hardware stores. I’d never seen a hardware store in Cuba before. Walk one street in either direction and the whole place is falling apart. But, in some areas, there are a lot of paladares, private restaurants, a huge number of taxis, a lot more economic life, and a lot more goods than I’ve ever seen before. That was quite a change for me.
CG: And I suppose it’s just going to keep changing?
JM: Oh yeah. The first big change will be when Americans can go freely as tourists and the biggest change will be when the embargo is lifted. Then Cuba will have credit to buy from the United States and that will bring many changes. Because still, the devastation in Havana is shocking—the amount of crumbling buildings that need paint and repairs, whole streets are destroyed, houses are falling apart. That’s going to take a long, long time to fix. And now there are people begging in the streets, which didn’t happen back in 1989. Now there are people coming after tourists to try to sell something they got illegally or to ask for money.
CG: But they didn’t have money before. Why weren’t they begging before?
JM: First of all, because there weren’t any tourists. Secondly, everybody could live more or less with the money and the ration card the government gave out. But now that there is more or less a free market, or a huge black market, the price for everything has gone up. But the pensions of the older people and the salaries haven’t gone up. All of that has led to a culture of begging. Back in the 1950’s, Havana was as notorious as Mexico and many other Latin American countries for beggars. But before the collapse of the Soviet Union, that didn’t happen—the government would have clamped down on that big time. Now it’s more relaxed. There’s nothing they can do to stop it, and there are too many other problems.
CG: Is Fidel still alive? [This is a joke in Miami because Cubans there have celebrated his death on multiple occasions, thinking he had died when he was actually still alive.]
JM: Yeah, apparently. His birthday was sometime this week, and he wrote a new piece. He’s 89. He’s alive but disconnected. The plug got pulled from him. I’m sure he’s not doing so well in his health and his head, so I’m sure he’s not making any decisions.
CG: Thank you so much for speaking to me about your experiences in the world of Cuban art. My mother’s family is Cuban and I’d like to go back someday. I don’t know what to expect.
JM: The best thing is to go without expectations and see what happens!
_______
Carmella Guiol: I know that you were born in Cuba. When did you come to Miami?
Juan Martinez: In 1966. I was 15 years old.
CG: And you’ve been here ever since?
JM: Yes. In Florida, but not necessarily Miami.
CG: What made you interested in art history, and specifically Cuban art history?
JM: To be honest, it was by chance. I was in college and couldn’t find a major I liked. I came across a teacher, Robert Thiele, who taught a humanities class that happened to be art history. He turned me on to the subject. Afterward, I was speaking to a friend of mine who had also taken an art history class, and he told me I could major in it. So I kept that in the back of my head. I went to Gainesville for my undergraduate degree in liberal arts, where I took a lot of philosophy and art history classes. I liked art history better, and I decided to get a master’s degree in it at Florida State University. I had no idea, even in grad school, what I would do after I graduated. When I completed my master’s degree in Spanish medieval art and came to Miami, I went to see an exhibition of Cuban art, which I had no knowledge of—Cuban art was never mentioned in my studies. That exhibition opened up this whole world for me. I began to research other exhibitions in Miami and got access to a couple of collections. They opened the Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture back in 1982, and I began to think if I went back to school, that’s what I would want to do my dissertation on. So that’s what I did. My motivation was that I liked it and it was right in my backyard, which was important if I wanted to do research and write.
CG: And you have traveled for your research in Cuba?
JM: Yes, I went back to FSU for my PhD and decided to do my dissertation in Cuban art. Up until that point, I thought that there was enough Cuban art in Miami and the United States that I didn’t have to go to Cuba. But my major professor at FSU thought I had to go to Cuba and see the collection at the Cuban National Museum and do archival work. He was right.
It was 1989, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, when I returned to Cuba for the first time since 1966. Going back to a country that was completely communist was amazing. Every billboard was political. There was no advertising whatsoever. I went to a hotel and I was told, “You have to eat in this hotel. You cannot eat anywhere else.” It was a very strange system. There was no private anything. It was a lesson in living in a country that had a total planned economy and one planned ideology. Everyone was afraid to speak his or her mind. It was very strange. But I did make very good contacts with the Museo Nacional. They opened everything for me from the beginning. And so I started going to Cuba once or twice a year for the next 13 or 14 years to do research.
CG: And did you find that there were other people doing this kind of research?
JM: Not when I went back to Cuba. I studied Cuban modern art of the 1930s and 40s, which is when modern art began in Cuba. In Cuba, there was Ramon Vasquez, curator of the Museo Nacional’s salas moderna, who knew a lot about that time period. Nobody else knew about it in Cuba or the United States. Today, it’s huge. People are doing dissertations on this time period. Auction houses are filled with pieces and there are exhibitions in galleries and museums. But back then there was no interest.
As far as people from Miami going to Cuba to do research on art—no matter what kind— there was a guy from New York who was going to do research on 1980s art. That was it; there was no one from Miami. In fact, back in 1994, when I published my book on the generation of artists from the 1930s, I created quite a few enemies in Miami when people read the acknowledgements and saw I was giving thanks to the Museo Nacional in Cuba and libraries in Cuba. People didn’t think that was a thing to do; it was unacceptable.
CG: Art historians?
JM: There were not many art historians in Miami. Although there were people in general: collectors, intellectuals, art critics, writers of history and Cuban culture, the people who hung around the former Cuban museum here in Miami or the Universal bookstore, the sociology and Spanish teachers at Miami Dade College (where I used to work).
On the other hand, a famous independent Cuban art critic, Gerardo Mosquera, wrote a review about my book and called it a “cultural bridge.” He thought it was great that I gave credit to the University of Miami library and the Cuban National Library, the museum in Miami and in the museum in Havana. He commented that I worked with people on both sides to put it together. I wasn’t thinking about that when I was doing it. I was trying to get help from everybody. But he saw it as cultural bridge.
CG: So you’re saying interest in Cuban art has increased since that time?
JM: Tremendously.
CG: In all of the States? Or Florida in particular?
JM: In all of them. Interest in Cuban art began to increase in the 1990s and then even more after 2000. Sometime in the late 90s, I proposed a conference to the College of Art Association, the biggest association of art historians in the United States, to see who was studying Cuban art. They sent out a call for submissions and around ten or twelve individuals sent in papers. They were working on Cuban poster art, Wifredo Lam, Amelia Pelaez, Ana Mendieta, Victor Patrico Landaluz, and Rita Longa. People were doing this work at universities all over the country: Chicago, California, Texas. I was really impressed by how many people were working on Cuban art.
The interest has only increased. It’s apparent at the auction houses, Christies and Sotheby’s where there was an increasing amount of Cuban artwork starting in the 90s. There is a special section of the auction that focuses on modern Latin American art, and Cuban art was the second most valuable category, right after Mexico. This was the art people were looking at the most, buying the most, and paying the highest prices. Not even Argentina or Brazil were close behind.
CG: There seems to be a fascination between the United States and Cuba. Why do you think there’s that interest?
JM: I think part of it has to do with Cuba being closed to the world for such a long time. It’s this country we know so little about. Americans cannot even travel there. Also, with the collapse of Society Union, Cuba went through a serious depression, as bad, or worse, than the 1930s depression in the United States. Cuba being the last communist government and being geographically close has something to do with it.
In the case of Cuban modern art, there started to be an interest in modern art outside of Europe in the 1990s. We call this “global modernism.” People were beginning to write papers on modern art in Nigeria, Japan, Romania, and Argentina. The height of the modern art period spanned from 1880 to 1940, and the bulk of European art created then was pretty well researched. During that time, there were people from all over living in Paris because it was the art capital of the world. People came to live the bohemian life. Afterward, they went home—to Africa, Asia, Latin America—and kept making and teaching art. People from those countries began to think, “Rather than doing research on Picasso, I’m going to do research on Amelia Pelaez in Cuba, because that’s where I come from.” In academia, there was a growing interest in the modern art from other countries, Latin America in particular. There were British and Latin American art historians writing the history of Mexican muralism, and Argentinian, Brazilian, and Colombian art. It was during that general movement that people began to pay attention to Cuba.
CG: Do you think that this bridge between Florida and Cuba has influenced art on either side?
JM: Let’s talk about the art of the past and the art of the present. With the art of the past, which is what I deal with, the influence can be seen in the huge collections of Cuban art in Miami. When the Cubans went through the “periodo especial,” the depression of 1990s, they were in need of money. At the same time, Cubans in Miami were becoming wealthy and began to collect art. A lot of Cuban modern art from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s came to Miami illegally. Miami is the place to study Cuban art because the big collections of Cuban art are here.
I showed some of that at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. The museum asked me to curate an exhibition back in 2012-13, and I chose 100 iconic pieces of Cuban art that are already in Miami. People were amazed. Even people from Cuba who were traveling through here and came to see the exhibition were amazed. A curator from el Museo Nacional de Cuba, Roberto Cobas, came and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. People came from New York and all over. Florida is now a major repository of Cuban modern art. People who are researching Cuban modern art or making books come to Miami from all over the United States and even Cuba.
As far as contemporary Cuban art, what they call the “1980s generation” of artists is probably the better known of all the generations. They exhibited and were collected all over the world. In the 1990s, about 90% of them came to live in Miami. So there was a presence of living Cuban artists in Miami who influenced the whole city, having exhibitions and so on. Since about 2000, a great many Cuban artists come here all the time. They present their work and talk to other artists. It’s a presence, more than an influence.
CG: These Cuban artists that come here, are they creating art here, too?
JM: Some of them. The ones from the 1980s generation have been creating art here since the 1990s. The ones that pass through oftentimes stay long enough to make art; bring art with them from Cuba; or make it in New York because they have a scholarship or grant and then bring it down to Miami and have an exhibit, show it at a gallery, or leave it with a friend. There is always a large number of Cuban artists passing through Miami.
CG: In contemporary art, have you noticed a change in the style, given that a lot of it is happening here in Miami now? I’m wondering if there’s a difference between the art created here or there in Cuba.
JM: No, not really. The 1980s art in Cuba and Miami was all about Cuba. The 1990s was also all about Cuba. But contemporary art by the people who stayed in Miami hardly makes reference to Cuba anymore. The art by people who pass through only sometimes makes reference to it. With the beginning of the new millennium and because artists travel so much, art now deals with international issues. Artists might make a reference to Cuba, but many don’t. Art is not about nationality anymore.
CG: Obviously we feel a strong Cuban connection in Miami. But I’m wondering – how does this connection manifest in Cuba?
JM: As far as art is concerned, Cuba has not wanted to have any representation of Cuban American artists there. In the 1990s, Cuba began to open to some Cuban American artists, but from other parts of the United States that they thought were “friendly”—not from Miami. More recently, that has been changing. In fact, there’s a curator named Elizabeth Cerejido who has been organizing an exchange this year. She takes Cuban American artists from Miami to Cuba where they have an exhibition and give a talk. Then, she brings artists from Havana to Miami and they exhibit and so on. For the first time, you have artists from Miami going over there, exhibiting their work, and talking about it. I imagine that’s going to increase, but it’s very recent.
CG: And why were they against Cuban American artists from Miami specifically?
JM: The Cuban government in general has difficulty accepting anything from Miami. Miami is the enemy. It’s where all the anti-Cuba politics are. It’s the seed of the traditional exile—all the organizations and the people against the Cuban government are there. In some cases, I think the Cuban government also doesn’t want to accept the success of Cubans in Miami. I don’t want to call it envy. But in Miami, some Cubans have become lawyers and doctors and professors and made a lot of money. They live well and they have taken over the city more or less—the city mayor, the county commissioner, the people in city government are Cubans. The collections of Cuban art here are huge and extremely good. That could not have possibly taken place in Cuba. All of that makes for resentment. But I think all of that is changing. I hope it is.
CG: What are your thoughts on this day, the reopening of the American embassy in Cuba after 54 years?
JM: I think it’s a positive step to begin the process of acceptance. On the part of Cuba, accepting there’s a huge migration and accepting the people who migrated, even the ones who migrated back in the 1960s, who are the ones they have the most problems with. They don’t have a problem with the people who came in the 1990s and 2000s, because they go back all the time. But I think they should accept even the people who came to Miami in the 60s, the traditional exiles. They don’t necessarily have to be enemies.
On the part of the Cubans here, accepting that the revolution will run its course and they’re not going to be the ones who make the changes. It’s been there for 55 years and it has its own dynamism, and it’s going to continue to have its own dynamism. If it’s going to end or not—whatever happens—it’s going to happen from within.
Each should stop trying to change the other, accept differences, and try to have some sort of relationship to begin to know each other better. There’s a lot of suspicion on both sides as to who’s who and who wants what.
I have heard from others—Puerto Ricans, British—who have left their country and then go back that they’re not very well accepted. They’re seen as foreigners. And I have found that to be the case with me in Cuba. They treat me very well, and I have done a lot as far as my research goes. I received nothing but help. But on a personal basis, they let me know that I’m not Cuban.
CG: Were there Cubans doing this kind of work when you started back in 1989?
JM: Not in Cuba. There was a lack of interest because everyone was into contemporary art. There is a professor at the Universidad de l’Habana named Luz Merino who was working with Cuban Republic magazines and illustrations, which is the time period I was working on, 1902-1959. We were working with some of the same artists, too. She was also dealing with the same art history critics from the 20s and 30s and 40s that I was. But no, besides her and Ramon Vasquez at the Museo Nacional, there was no one else.
At one point, when I was writing my second book on Carlos Enriquez, I realized I wanted other voices in my book. I asked a couple of friends at the Universidad de l’Habana to look through their students’ theses and dissertations to see if anyone was working on Carlos Enriquez. Even though he’s a major Cuban artist, no one had done anything, except a biography published in the mid-1980s by a journalist named Juan Sanchez. At one point, I found a paper on Los Onces, which was a group that worked between 1951 and 1954, and then informally all the way to 1963. But that was it.
There was more interest about that period in Miami amongst collectors than there was in Cuba. In Miami, El Museo Cubano de Arte y Cultura/the Cuban Museum of Art and Culture was very popular, and the people who collected art were interested in art up to 1959 because of nostalgia and a Cuban identity tied to the past. They were living in the past, and that’s what they wanted to see and collect and exhibit--La Cuba de ayer, Cuba of yesterday.
CG: Speaking more contemporarily, how do you see Cuban art history and that connection with Miami? You said there’s more collecting, more artists living here?
JM: Yes, and also more people interested in writing about it. For example, Elizabeth Cerejido. She writes about contemporary Cuban art and organizes exchanges. When I taught my class on Cuban art, a class I started in 1995 at Florida International University, it was always filled with people. I started with a class of 30, and by the time I stopped, it was a class of about 60. And I capped it. Who knows how many students would have gotten in there otherwise. I had students from all nationalities and races and a great many Cuban Americans. I also had many students do their theses in Cuban art, and some of them have gone on to pursue graduate study in it. One former student named Asiel Sepulveda at Texas Methodist University in Dallas is doing a dissertation in Cuban art right now. So now there is an interest in Cuban art history in Miami. I saw that again with students at FIU when I organized a class trip to Cuba. I only opened the class to 20, but I had students on long waiting lists.
CG: And you only organized the class trip that the one time?
JM: Yes, only once. It was very difficult to do because FIU didn’t particularly want me to go to Cuba. Afterward, legislation was passed that it made it impossible to use government money to do anything in Cuba. Cuba was also difficult because I had to negotiate for a good six months about what we were going to do when we got over there. The Cuban government wanted to control the whole agenda. I wanted to minimize anything that didn’t have to do with going to museums and attending art lectures. They didn’t want me to lecture. So we negotiated and went half and half. Every day we went somewhere and looked at actual art. I welcomed having Cuban art historians come with us and give us guest lectures, but I also wanted to have part of the day to talk to the students and give them assignments. It was very successful trip. It was the first time that anyone from Florida, much less Miami, took a group of students to Cuba, which was scary and fun at the same time.
CG: Here in Miami, we’ve kind of created our own Cuban culture. I’ve never been to Cuba so I don’t really know what Cuban culture looks like over there, but I have a certain idea of what Cuban culture looks like. So from your experience, what do you think has been lost? What do you think has been kept from that original Cuban culture when it came to Miami?
JM: When Cuban culture came to Miami it froze in time while Cuba continued to change. And then, as Cuba came under the influence of the Soviet Union, Cuban culture changed tremendously. For example, when I first went back to Cuba, I thought, “I’m going to have a Cuban breakfast – café con leche and pan con mantequilla.” But they didn’t have those things. Instead, they had the traditional eastern European breakfast of meat and cheeses. There was no Cuban bread with butter. There were no croquetas. That didn’t exist in 1989. And forget the café con leche. What they had was more like American or European coffee. I never found a decent cup of espresso for the longest time. I don’t think I’ve found it yet.
CG: It existed before and then it disappeared?
JM: It disappeared and then came back in the late 90s, They started opening bakeries that had the Cuban type of bread, and they started to have croquetas and pastelitos de guayaba, things that I didn’t see anywhere between 1989 and 1995.
Also, there was a difference in the words. The vocabulary changed completely; it was almost like an “archaeology of words.” Words that we used in Miami were not used in Cuba, words like chévere and decente. They used new words in Cuba, other words. The first time I read the Granma newspaper [official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party], I couldn’t understand half of what I was reading. They used words I’d never heard of in very complicated ways. They developed their own kind of vocabulary.
CG: So Miami became more Cuban that Cuba?
JM: It became more of a Cuba frozen in time. There were a number of things from the 1940s and 50s you could find in Miami that were discontinued in Cuba. When I went to Cuba in 1988, 1989, there was no sandwich Cubano. It was only in the late 1990s that I start seeing it on menus. Apparently, it disappeared from the 60s all the way to the late 90s, when Cubans from Miami began to go there more and Cuba began to open up and have more tourism because they had no money. The Soviet Union stopped giving them money, and the only thing they could come up with was tourism, so they began to go back to some of the old things people might have expected.
CG: Have you been back recently?
JM: The last time I went back was in November 2013. I had not been there since 2005 or 2006, and the changes were amazing. There were people selling fruits and vegetables in the streets, onion and garlic and all kinds of produce you couldn’t find for a long time in Cuba. Street sellers now have a wide variety of produce that’s locally grown.
And the amount of tourism was insane. At one time, on the Malecon, the boulevard that runs along the ocean, I counted 13 huge, luxury buses full of tourists. The amount of stores was surprising, too. There’s a street called Obispo, and where, before, there were a few restaurants and bookstores and dilapidated stores. Now, there is a hair salon that reminds me of Coral Gables. And there are liquor stores and hardware stores. I’d never seen a hardware store in Cuba before. Walk one street in either direction and the whole place is falling apart. But, in some areas, there are a lot of paladares, private restaurants, a huge number of taxis, a lot more economic life, and a lot more goods than I’ve ever seen before. That was quite a change for me.
CG: And I suppose it’s just going to keep changing?
JM: Oh yeah. The first big change will be when Americans can go freely as tourists and the biggest change will be when the embargo is lifted. Then Cuba will have credit to buy from the United States and that will bring many changes. Because still, the devastation in Havana is shocking—the amount of crumbling buildings that need paint and repairs, whole streets are destroyed, houses are falling apart. That’s going to take a long, long time to fix. And now there are people begging in the streets, which didn’t happen back in 1989. Now there are people coming after tourists to try to sell something they got illegally or to ask for money.
CG: But they didn’t have money before. Why weren’t they begging before?
JM: First of all, because there weren’t any tourists. Secondly, everybody could live more or less with the money and the ration card the government gave out. But now that there is more or less a free market, or a huge black market, the price for everything has gone up. But the pensions of the older people and the salaries haven’t gone up. All of that has led to a culture of begging. Back in the 1950’s, Havana was as notorious as Mexico and many other Latin American countries for beggars. But before the collapse of the Soviet Union, that didn’t happen—the government would have clamped down on that big time. Now it’s more relaxed. There’s nothing they can do to stop it, and there are too many other problems.
CG: Is Fidel still alive? [This is a joke in Miami because Cubans there have celebrated his death on multiple occasions, thinking he had died when he was actually still alive.]
JM: Yeah, apparently. His birthday was sometime this week, and he wrote a new piece. He’s 89. He’s alive but disconnected. The plug got pulled from him. I’m sure he’s not doing so well in his health and his head, so I’m sure he’s not making any decisions.
CG: Thank you so much for speaking to me about your experiences in the world of Cuban art. My mother’s family is Cuban and I’d like to go back someday. I don’t know what to expect.
JM: The best thing is to go without expectations and see what happens!
