Selling Off a Family's Treasured Art
Photo: Ruben (C) is joined by Emilio (L) and another employee during the measurement of a painting purchased in central Havana.
Emilio navigated his vintage Russian Lada along muddy back roads flanked by weeds and shrubbery that hid every side road and makeshift house in a typical rural Cuban community. Here, away from the prying eyes of the Committees for Defense of the Revolution, out of earshot of the National Revolutionary Police, everyday men and women had constructed their own homes from concrete brick and corrugated tin. No special government licenses here, no need to fear what you said regarding the “Commandante.” This impoverished community was one extended family, hiding out amid a forest of reeds and trees only a few miles from one of Fidel Castro’s own private compounds on Avenida Quinta.
In my lap on the passenger’s seat, I held a painting I’d recently purchased at an art fair in central Havana. After having mentioned to my cousin Emilio that I’d like to find someone who could build me a suitable frame from Cuban cedar, he replied that he knew just the man.
Ruben is a slight, quiet man with a rolling paunch of a belly whose missing fingers are a tell-tale sign of his trade. A carpenter all his life, he had been born into a typical middle-class family at the time of the revolution’s triumph in 1959. Now nearing 50, Ruben lives with his mother, wife and children in a small but well-built brick home, surrounded by tall weeds near the waters west of Havana. He had toiled over the course of a year to construct the home on his own and took great pride in showing me the beautiful cedar trim he had shaped by hand in his backyard workshop. There, several friends assisted Ruben in a rudimentary carpentry shop, building everything from doors to caskets, all from beautifully fragrant Cuban cedar. The workshop wasn’t state-sanctioned so its location, hidden off his town’s main drag, Avenida Quinta, kept him far away from prying eyes.
Photo: Ruben (L) measures a painting before creating a new frame.
Measurements taken, deals struck, we cracked open a bottle of Havana Club rum and took a break from Cuba’s intense June heat, sitting down to chat beneath the blue tarp that cover Ruben’s benches and machinery. Setting down his empty rum glass, Ruben stood up and walked back to the workbench. A smile appeared on his face as he pulled a cardboard tube out from a pile of picture frame moldings and raw cedar stock. Ushering me over to the bench he unrolled a painting that had been a part of his family’s collection since the initial years of the revolution. There before me sat an original Wilfredo Lam painting dated 1961.
Photo: The painting in question.
“Listen,” said Ruben . . . “you can have it for ten grand. This thing’s probably worth four times that but what the hell am I going to do with a 40,000 dollar painting when I can barely support my family? If you can smuggle it out of here, it’s yours.” I knew the painting was valuable and I also knew that several thousand dollars in Ruben’s pocket would go very far in supporting him and his extended family. The money I could make putting the canvas on the auction block could also have done a great deal of good for my own aunts, uncles and cousins but, how to get it out? Upon my return to New York City I consulted the sister of a dear friend, a prominent painter who shall remain nameless. “Jean” had several contacts in the seedy world of smugglers and I figured “what the hell.” My plans were ludicrous to say the least. I had run through a number of scenarios from buying another painting in Havana in order to obtain the necessary stamp needed to export art from the national territory to hiring a small yacht on which I could hide the painting in a secret compartment but nothing convinced me that I’d ever be able to pull off such a hair-brained scheme. And then there was the question of Cuban patrimony. The idea of actively working to take a piece of Cuba’s national heritage off the island seemed more than a bit distasteful. I certainly didn’t want to sink to the level of the revolutionary hierarchy that had seized hundreds of valuable paintings from Cuban families in the early 60s, only to begin selling some of the confiscated works via the world’s most celebrated auction houses 30-plus years later. This was not for me.
That summer, Ruben became what I consider a close friend. He had known my cousin Emilio for years and always treated me like a brother. I wanted nothing more than to help him but, well, shit. I’m no art smuggler and I suppose you could say my moral compass was more than a bit erratic when I attempted to justify my plans.
The painting? Ruben was never able to find a buyer – too dangerous. As far as I know, that $40,000 masterpiece is still rolled up in a cardboard tube, lost amid a stack of hand tools and wood, destined to remain in the dark until God knows when.
