Topsy-turvy laws, trendiness bring Cuban artists riches

Topsy-turvy laws, trendiness bring Cuban artists riches
BY ANDREA RODRIGUEZ
Associated Press

HAVANA
Late one balmy spring night during Havana's 12th Biennial, young
working-class men and women lounged on a stretch of sand dotted with
folding chairs and umbrellas, an artificial beach created as an art
installation on the capital's Malecon seaside promenade.

Meanwhile, at Sotheby's auction house in New York, the beach's
40-year-old creator, Arles del Rio, sold another piece featured at the
last biennial for $11,875, more than 40 times the annual salary of an
ordinary Cuban. The piece, titled "Fly Away," is made of chain-link
fence with a hole in the shape of a jet, making it appear the plane flew
right through it.

Cuba's growing international trendiness combined with the government's
topsy-turvy labor regulations are making sculptors, painters and other
artists some of the richest people on the island. It's a demonstration
both of Cuba's accomplishments in culture and education, as well as its
economic difficulties after a half-century of communism.

"When I was in art school, my parents almost threw me out of the house
because I hadn't chosen a 'real' career," said printmaker Max Delgado.
"These days, there's real competition among kids studying music or
painting."

Cuba allows its citizens to work in hundreds of types of private jobs
outside the state-run economy but virtually none of those positions
allow entrepreneurs to create real wealth. The island's most potentially
profitable business sectors and professions remain entirely under
control of the state, which currently pays an average salary of a little
more than $23 a month, or about $280 a year, in addition to the heavily
subsidized health and other government services everyone gets.

But an exception was created at the end of the 1980s, when independent
artists became some of the first Cubans that the government allowed to
earn money outside the confines of the state and keep the profits from
the direct sales of their work, sometimes for tens of thousands of dollars.

That has created a tiny class of artists who are wealthy by Cuban
standards and can divide their time between the island and countries
such as the United States or Spain. They can duck Cuba's roughly 50
percent income tax on works sold outside Cuba.

Cuban economist Arturo Lopez-Levy, a lecturer at the University of
Denver, said that under the island's bifurcated economy most people earn
puny state salaries while those with access to foreign money like the
top-end artists can live like kings.

In the Sotheby's auction two weeks ago, the works of Cuban artists
surpassed expectations. One piece by Alexandro Arrechea went for
$118,000, a lot of three pieces by a pair of artists who call themselves
Los Carpinteros captured $60,000, and a sculpture by the artists'
collective "The Merger" got $50,000.

"This situation is due above all to the creation of a two-lane economy,
with one sector connected to the market and another with the remnants of
the command economy inherited from the 1970s, '80s and '90s," Lopez-Levy
said.

Along with medicine and science, art and music are fields in which
small, poor Cuba punches far above its weight. While it treats medicine
and scientific research as resources to be jealously guarded for the
good of the nation, the government has seen artists and musicians as
valued cultural ambassadors who are afforded special treatment.

The phenomenon is only expected to grow with warming ties between Cuba
and the U.S. The detente is allowing more American visitors, including
wealthy art collectors, to travel legally to the island on "educational"
tours that often include the purchase of art, which can be legally
exported back to the United States.

Organizers of the 2015 Biennial that opened May 22 have said they expect
2,500 Americans will visit this year's fair, many of them art buyers,
before it wraps up on June 22.

Don Pappalardo, founder and CEO of Troika, an arts and entertainment
marketing consultancy in Southern California, said Cuba is "is one of
the most vital areas for contemporary art in the world today."

"Growing hype around Cuba will likely attract collectors who are looking
for the next big thing," Pappalardo, himself an avid collector of Latin
American works, said during a visit to Havana Biennial. "Some prices
will go up, which is great for the artists. Some prices may go crazy,
which is great for investment collectors but not always great for
everyone else."

Many of the visiting Americans are touring middle-class Havana
neighborhoods dotted with immaculately restored homes where the artists
live and have created private galleries of their work.

"Compared to the median they live very well," Rafael Acosta de Arriba,
an art critic and former head of the National Fine Arts Council, said of
Cuba's artists. "Cuban artists are very well compensated, but from
abroad because in Cuba there is no domestic art market."

Top painters, sculptors and other artists, for instance, are among the
very few Cubans who regularly patronize high-priced private restaurants
that cater mainly to foreigners.

For the artists themselves, the situation is a lucky combination of the
quality of their art and an economy that has left them in a position of
unexpected privilege.

"Cuban art is gaining fans," Delgado said. "You can take advantage of
earning at global prices and living and working here."

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Associated Press writer Beth J. Harpaz contributed to this report from
Havana.

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