Splendor Amid Poverty: Gallery Nights With Cuba's Gilded Elite

Splendor Amid Poverty: Gallery Nights With Cuba's Gilded Elite
By Lois Farrow Parshley
inShare Sep 5 2012, 7:36 AM ET 1

A photographer's inside look at the secret lives of Havana's super-rich,
just down the street from its many poor, are a reminder that this
supposed communist paradise is anything but equal.
Courtesy of Michael Dweck Studios.
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A dancer performs at Havana's Club Tropicana, an elite haunt open since
1939, just past midnight.

HAVANA, Cuba -- On a recent, dark Havana night, the breeze blew the
ocean spray over a crumbling sea wall along the city's seaward road as
New York photographer Michael Dweck took a seat across a dockside table
from Alex Castro, one of Fidel's sons. Alex is balding and solid; in
Dweck's photos, part of a larger project to document Cuba's upper crust,
the young, hulking Castro sits with his chin in his hands.

Dweck had arrived at the restaurant, a small open air patio with bare
lightbulbs hung from buoys, after several wrong turns through the
blackened streets of a western suburb. It was a private sort of place,
the kind with no signs and several bolts on the front door, popular with
"the family," as the Castros are called around here.

"My father," Alex told Dweck in an interview, "is an artist with words.
Very good words." He himself is not so verbose. Dweck hunched a little
nervously as Alex flipped through a book of Dweck's photos that captured
Alex's friends and family in various intimate arrangements. "It's the
first time he's seen these," Dweck told me. Waitresses brought out
rounds of seared tuna, sushi, and ceviche between bottles of chilled
white wine. Alex cruised through the pages, lingering on the shot of his
brother's ex-girlfriend posing semi-nude, flipping past the interview
quoting him saying that in Cuba, "everyone can better themselves, even
without financial resources."

In the photos, models with martini glasses laugh in the back of an open
convertible, women play mini-golf at the yacht club where Hemingway used
to fish, the Castro boys smoke cigars. The glossy black and white images
document Cuba's most privileged -- artists, musicians, models, and
filmmakers -- portraying lives of splendor in one of the poorest
countries in the world. This was Dweck's eighth visit to Cuba, this time
for the opening of his show, Habana Libre, for which his shots of
Havana's elite were displayed at the Fototeca de Cuba Museum. Dweck is
the first American photographer to have a solo exhibit in Cuba since the
embargo began 52 years ago. "I've had the chance," he said, "to see what
most Americans, most Cubans for that matter, will never get a chance to
see."

He didn't just mean his intimacy with the communist leader's family,
although that's been a part of it. Dweck has talked with Alex about
visiting Dweck's house in Montauk, and Fidel is said to display, hanging
over his bed, a portrait of a nude woman from one of Dweck's previous
projects. In Cuba, taking pictures of the ruling family or reporting on
their personal lives is prohibited; in the Press Freedom Index, Cuba
ranked 167 out of 178. This is a place where social capital can be a
stronger currency than the peso, and you have to know the right people
to see this side of society.

As Dweck says, he "was lucky to get lucky." He stumbled into his entrée
after a chance meeting his very first week in Cuba in 2009, when a
well-connected British expatriate invited Dweck to a lavish evening
affair. "I wandered into the party," Dweck said, "and by the time it
ended at 3 a.m., I knew I had stumbled into this hidden world." Dweck
wound up renting an apartment in Havana, a 13th floor hideaway with
wrap-around terraces in the last modern building built in Cuba, a
stacked tower finished in 1960. Camilo, Che Guevera's son, lived several
floors down. Dweck made friends quickly (who doesn't like being told
they're interesting and beautiful?) and threw two dinner parties, where
he continued to meet Havana's well-heeled crowd. Before long, it was as
if he was one of them.
• • • • •

Havana's reigning social scene is remarkably welcoming, even to an
American. This city is perhaps one of the last places where upper-crust
bacchanalia of this sort are open to whoever shows up; although Cubans
are some of the warmest people in the world, the hospitality here is
mostly because you don't hear about these parties unless you're the kind
of person who would already be invited.

My first time in Cuba, I was not that type of person, and neither were
the Cubans I met. I arrived in Havana on an old Russian Yakovlev, a
plane with springs sticking through the seats and duct-tape holding up
the paneling, and stayed at first in a concrete, barracks-like building
with a family whose 14 year-old son had vacated the room so his parents
could collect rent on it. The father, who holds an engineering graduate
degree from Russia, makes $20 dollars a month and is saving up in hopes
of one day sending his son away.

Later that week, in January of 2010, I hailed a 1954 Chevrolet taxi,
literally held together in places with wire and twine, and set off
across the city looking for farms. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the
loss of its sugar subsidies brought the Cuban economy to its knees. On
the island, the early 1990s are now referred to as the "Special Period,"
a bleak time when the average Cuban lost 10 pounds. The country's cats
suffered far worse, and a native species of anaconda was eaten into
extinction. Urban farms, often considered a liberal idea, were
introduced on the island not out of ideology but out of grim necessity.

I found one of Havana's largest urban farms in a neighborhood of Centro
Habana that had the bombed-out, worn-down feeling of a war zone.
Crumbling concrete apartments loomed over slender rows of baby corn. A
stray chicken foot lay sprawled in the dirt near the carrots. At the
Ministry of Agriculture, a spokesperson told me that in the early 1990s,
the government created a system to renovate rundown buildings (of which
there are plenty) into arable plots. The produce from these 3,810 city
farms is subsidized and sold locally -- the only way many people can
afford vegetables.

A Cuban governmental official spoke with me on the condition of
anonymity. She told me the salary of the average Cuban, under $20 U.S.
dollars a month, is almost impossible to survive on. I had no idea then
that, a few miles away, people were living with original Matisse prints
in their bedroom.

Cuba's newspapers have trumpeted the Arab Spring as sister revolutions
("Together we will triumph!"), but there's been no mention of Occupy
Wall Street. Since 2008, President Raul Castro has cautiously introduced
some pro-market reforms -- people can now own their own homes, small
businesses, and even employ other Cubans who are not their relatives --
but, so far, the masses remain poor and the elites removed. A one-legged
man hawking CDs to tourists on a street near the Fototeca Museum where
Dweck's photos were displayed said he didn't believe Cuba, or the fates
of the rich, would ever change. "They say about us, if we eat, we eat,"
he said of the ruling class. "If we don't, we don't." That he was
willing to say such a thing to a foreigner at all speaks volumes about
how much Cuba has opened.

Nevertheless, in a country supposedly founded on egalitarian ideals, the
Cuban select is as gilded as ever. At the Biltmore Yacht Club, where
Ernest Hemingway (known around here as El Papa') used to fish, I spent a
lazy afternoon drinking mojitos on lounge chairs, while Toby
Brocklehurst, Dweck's initial contact, expounded on the low price of
lobster in Havana and the stupidity of the U.S. embargo. "Cuba is
harmless," he told me between drinks. "What are they going to do, attack
you with cocktail sticks?"

In fact, the relative paucity of resources in Cuba (and the divisions
between rich and poor) was evident long before I reached the island
itself. Back in the Miami airport, people pushed mountains of luggage
wrapped in lime-green anti-theft plastic slowly toward the check-in
desk. It would be wrong to call them bags, per se; on my flight, there
were boxes labeled as medicina, tires, spare engines, 33 inch LCD TVs,
fishing rods, and an electric guitar. Just getting to Cuba is "un
misión" as the woman behind me in line told me, and one not taken
lightly. For families still in Cuba, these American relatives can be a
lifeline.
• • • • •
How, you can almost hear Karl Marx asking from the grave, did an
ostensibly communist country become so riven by disparity? The simplest
answer may be that Fidel Castro's struggle for power was never truly a
"peasant revolution."

As a young man Fidel actually joined the Partido Ortodoxo, an
anti-communist political party. The CIA told the U.S. Senate in 1959
that "we believe Castro is not a member of the Communist party," and, as
late as 1961 American political scientists were still arguing over his
status as a communist. Castro himself repeatedly denied an affiliation
throughout his rise to power; it wasn't until after U.S. President
Eisenhower refused to support Castro's presidency that he began to
develop a relationship with the Soviet Union. Although a half-century of
politically charged rhetoric and rhetorically defended politics have
obscured this history, Fidel Castro's interest in politics was never
really Marxist.

Before taking power, Fidel referred to nationalization as a "cumbersome
instrument," and pledged to not nationalize the sugar industry. He even
wrote in Coronet Magazine in 1958 that he was fighting for a "genuine
representative government." But after taking power, it didn't take long
for Castro to change his tune. Immediately after U.S.-backed President
Fulgencio Batista fled, Fidel, apparently worried about consolidating
his position, arrested some of his most important former
comrades-in-arms. Castro's former brother-in-law, Raphael Diaz Balart,
said of Castro's motivations at the time: "He was just in that moment an
opportunist leader who wanted to promote himself."
• • • • •

Half a century later, the Castros are still here, firmly at the top of
the ruling class. Looking at Dweck's photos, it's clear the glorious
revolution left Cuba's classless society with a few people on top of the
pile.On the evening of Michael Dweck's grand opening, Alex Castro, as
well as Che Guevara's son Camilo, wandered upstairs with a few armed
bodyguards, where his own photo was waiting to stare back at him. Later,
another of Fidel's sons, Alejandro Castro, joked to Dweck, "Thanks for
making me famous."

The translated title of the show was "Free Havana," an irony that had a
few of the patrons chuckling to themselves. But Dweck insisted his
project was never meant to be political. As an artist, he says he wants
to pursue the seductive, and as anyone clued into the tropes of Havana
nights could tell you, Cuba is a sinuous, sexy place. Dweck captured
scenes of nostalgic romance, a simplified glimpse of an aristocratic
world that, as anyone who has watched the Edwardian-era English
aristocrats in Downton Abbey knows, can be disturbingly easy to glorify.
Perhaps it was Dweck's sincerity in this process that enabled him to win
the friendship and trust in the high places that he did. (A more cynical
take would be that the Castros are just happy to finally have a little
good publicity.) But in a country where most people refuse to go on
record disparaging the regime for fear of retaliation, a project like
his can't escape politics.

"The well-off Cuban artists I met and photographed seemed the embodiment
of the hopes of their poorest neighbors," Dweck wrote in a recent op-ed
in the Huffington Post. "I know what you're thinking, that'd be like
calling the Kardashians 'signs on the road to America's recovery.'" This
is different, Dweck says, because his subjects show what the island
could be, which in some ways is all the more tragic. "It shows Cubans
who are talented and privileged," he said. "It gives them something to
be proud of." Although lauded in the art world, Dweck's book has
attracted criticism for the conspicuous absence in its pages of the
"real" Cuba, where, as one Amazon reviewer put it, "no one is free."

At the crowded opening, after waiters handed out 700 rounds of gazpacho
shots and many more of liquor, the lights flickered off in one of
Havana's frequent blackouts. The party continued in darkness,
undisturbed. "Eso sea Cuba," someone laughed. "This is Cuba." The
subjunctive tense, used in Spanish to connote uncertainty about the
future, was unmistakable.

Viviana Limpias, deputy representative of the United Nations Children's
Fund in Cuba, told Dweck in an interview, "There's very little the
privileged class has that everyone else doesn't have, except money."
After the gallery closed, everyone retired to a four-story penthouse
after-party. Men in linen suits and white crocodile-skin shoes gathered
around the billiards table. Jack Bruce, the bassist of the 1960s British
rock band Cream, found the hors d'oeuvres (I wanted to ask, but didn't,
if he knew that Fidel had once outlawed the Beatles). The models piled
into a velvet-lined hammock. By the time the black-tie clad waiters
served the second course and we lit another round of cigarillos, I
wasn't so sure Ms. Limpias was right. As Dweck himself would tell you,
part of framing a shot is knowing what to leave out.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/09/splendor-amid-poverty-gallery-nights-with-cubas-gilded-elite/261956/