Cuba Libre

HAVANA—Cuban art today is rapidly gaining popularity and market value. While art is still relatively affordable in Havana — $500 can buy you a good piece by an up-and-coming artist — its worth is increasing beyond national borders due to demand from foreign collectors. Broken Concert, for example — a work on paper by the Cuban art collective Los Carpinteros — sold at Sotheby’s New York for $18,000 last November; back in 1999, Fuente Humana, a similar work on paper by the same group, sold for $1,500, just a fraction of that cost, at Christie’s New York. If foreign interest continues to rise at this rate, the Cuban art market could soon be facing a gold rush.

When I visited Havana last April, Nelson Ramirez de Arellano and Mabel Llevat, curators of the Fototeca de Cuba, the national photo archive, took me on a tour of Habana Vedado, a residential neighborhood peppered with artists’ studios. Among the artists I met, I was most impressed by the photographer Michel Pon, whose work was included in an exhibition of contemporary Cuban photography at the 2008 Arteahora art fair in Chicago in April. Like many young Cubans, he has never left the island, and his images tend to capture the dismal psychological state of Cubans in the early ’90s, right after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe led to the end of foreign communist subsidies to Cuba. In balsa [1994 09 05] – 3, for instance, he shows a boat used by Cubans to flee in 1994, the worst year of the economic and social crisis.

Cuban artists have seen a great deal of changes over the last ten years. An increasing number of them — Rene Francisco Rodriguez, Los Carpinteros, Tania Bruguera, Carlos Garaicoa, and Wilfredo Prieto, who was recently named the winner of Frieze’s Cartier Award 2008, to mention a few — have become part of the international art circuit and now regularly leave the island (with state permission) to spend time abroad on a work-invitation basis. At the same time, a new generation of emerging artists is proving able to support itself and a domestic art economy is developing.

“Many successful and established Cuban artists manage to live like the rich or upper middle class,” Pon told me, and subsequent visits to the studios of established artists such as Lester Campa, in Las Terrazas in the province of Pinar del Río, and Angel M. Ramirez, in Plaza de Armas in Old Havana, seemed to bear out his claim. Both appeared to be living well and offered to sell work directly to me.

They weren’t the only ones. Due to the scarcity of contemporary galleries in Cuba, most artists do not have representation, and therefore sell their work directly. Overall, on several visits, I was offered the painting Puff by Ramirez for €4,500 ($7,000); another painting, Mogote, by Campa for €7,000; a print of Serie Vacio II by Alejandro Gonzalez for €2,000; another print, titled La favorita, by Llevat, who is both a curator and an artist, for €400; and a print of Pon’s balsa [1994 09 05] – 3 for $1,000. Though the prices of artwork in Cuba are relatively modest compared to those on the international circuit, they are high enough to suggest that being an artist in Cuba can be a profitable profession. An employee I spoke with at the Banco Central de Cuba compared them to self-employed workers, since they retain most of the profits from sales of their work. This actually puts them at an advantage; in a country where most salaries are rigorously controlled by the state, and an economist or a doctor earns an average monthly salary of just 18 CUC ($18) and has no access to foreign currency, a couple of hundred or thousand minimally taxed dollars or euros is a substantial sum.

But while a lot of commerce appears to be happening privately, the state is also involved in the growth of the contemporary scene. Starting in 2000, the government opened a number of contemporary art galleries to compete on the international circuit, including Galeria Habana and Galeria La Casona. Both play an important role in connecting Cuban artists to foreign collectors and generating revenue for the government. They work on a percentage basis, earning 30 percent from sales in Havana and 50 percent from sales abroad at art fairs with the rest going to the artists, according to La Casona’s director, Alejandro Machado. Represented Cuban artists sell their work only through the galleries at prices aligned with the international art market.