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When Xantha and Sebastiaan Berger lead a visitor through their spacious Havana residence, whose living room is dominated by Alejandro Campins’s enormous, loosely painted depiction of a chimpanzee, they tend to narrate the stories behind their artworks in lively back-and-forths. In lightly accented English peppered with Spanish phrases, Xantha shares anecdotes: the context in which she and her husband met this or that artist; how young artists gave them 23 paintings to thank them for providing the funds to print an exhibition catalogue; why their two young children chose the Op art-esque painting with swirling bright colors by art student Alberto Lago for their playroom. Every few paces Sebastiaan interjects a detail — that the sculpture of a young girl made of metal by José Emilio Fuentes Fonseca (JEFF) is actually meant to stand before a large painting that now lives in the family’s pied-à-terre in Wassenaar (they’re originally from Holland), or how the Michel Pérez pictures in Xantha’s office began as studies of small figures made of modeling clay that the artist then painted on large square canvases.

If the Bergers speak like the proud parents of a brood of Cuban artists, it is with good reason. The collection they have assembled during the nearly 15 years they have lived in Havana, where Sebastiaan manages Ceiba Investments, an international company dedicated to investing in Cuba, has had a profound impact on a small group of the island’s young talents.

View Slideshow: Prime Time in Havana

"We collect art to have it and not to do anything commercial with it," says Sebastiaan. Rather than reflect a who’s who of established names in Havana’s cultural scene, their holdings — which they started acquiring in 1996, inspired by a show of JEFF’s work at Havana’s Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuale — trace an idiosyncratic path through the city’s art landscape. In Cuba, where a shaky economy makes for a skeletal local collecting base, emerging artists have few consistent sources of income. The Bergers have wed a desire to be surrounded by interesting artworks with the urge to supply the previously lacking patronage. Ceiba Investments has also begun to purchase artwork for its corporate offices. In consequence, the Bergers have become influential actors in Havana’s art scene and transformed their home into an oasis of contemporary art. "With young artists, you can help them grow by supporting them, by talking to them, introducing them to other people," says Sebastiaan. "And so there’s a rewarding factor at the same time, which is that you actually contribute something to their careers."

"You buy something, and you know that all of a sudden [the artist] can travel somewhere for a show because he has the money to get his papers in order and buy a ticket," says Xantha.

Over the years, the couple has developed a style of acquiring tailored to Havana’s tight-knit art scene. "We follow all the artists and go to the shows they do here," Xantha explains. "We run into them at parties and visit their studios. Sometimes we go and see what’s happening at the ISA [Superior Art Institute, Havana’s college of art], if there’s anything interesting and new. Our priority is to keep following the artists." And, Sebastiaan adds, "we don’t have work by any artist we don’t know personally."

The resulting collection comprises a majority of works by young artists like Campins, Pérez, and Niels Reyes interspersed with a few by such well-known names as Flavio Garciandía, Yoan Capote, and Ibrahim Miranda. Subsections are devoted to artists whose pieces the couple has been buying since the beginning. The Bergers’ set of works by Raúl Cordero, for instance, ranges from his videos to paintings based on those videos depicting hazy figures in action poses to his playful installations, like the "Welcome to Las Vegas" sign near their swimming pool. The couple’s JEFF holdings extend from his paintings through his sheet-metal sculptures. When the artist wanted to make a herd of large-scale elephants for the 2009 Havana Biennial, he turned to the Bergers to help finance the massive sheet-metal purchases he’d need to produce them. Three of the elephants, in vibrant red, white, and blue, now graze in the family’s front yard.

While they soak up the energy that living in close proximity with artwork generates, the Bergers, who keep about one-fifth of their collection in their Wassenaar apartment, have found maintaining artworks in Havana not without difficulties. "Especially in the work from the 1990s [when the collapse of the ussr deprived Cuba of Soviet economic support], the canvases are thin, the quality of the paint is bad, so we have to restore quite a lot of paintings," says Xantha. "The humidity, too, for works in other media — conservation is a challenge."

In spite of these issues, Xantha and Sebastiaan enjoy showing friends and family Havana’s art scene. Essentially, their home has become a private not-for-profit gallery. "With all of these wonderful things, we show them to as many people as we can," says Xantha. "We tell people, ‘If you like this artist, we’ll take you there.’"

"Prime Time in Havana" originally appeared in the January 2011 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2011 Table of Contents.