L a   R e v o l u c i ó n : Finding Cuba in Asunción
24 "  x  30 "
oil on canvas
1998

In this canvas, which looks like a movie set somewhere in Latin America, I turned to the story of  
another "lost city" -- the city of  my childhood , my native land, and of a whole way of life. Essentially, I painted the day my sisters left the country as if it were being filmed by the movie crew in the left foreground.
 
Curiously, the painted setting of this family event is not anywhere in Cuba. For personal reasons a bit too complicated to explain here, the buildings surrounding our family scenario in the canvas are in Asunción, Paraguay. The scene, in fact, seems to be part of a movie set --- to the right, under the blue carp with the dragon and the symbol of the crescent and star , are a blonde lady in white and a producer with a megaphone --- great "theater director"  friends of mine from Paraguay --- Myriam Sienra and Tito Chamorro. Art (film, painting) and reality are one in this movie set "tribute" to my childhood .

I am the little boy in the center of the composition, getting a " p i r u l í "  -- a sort of lollypop -- from another young boy my age, the candy vendor to the left of the colorful candy tree in front of the lady dressed in white. She is my grandmother, the two girls  to the right of me are my sisters, and the blond-haired man in the white jacket behind them is my father, with his doctor's medicine bag tucked under his arm. My mother is inside  the old American Buick, almost in flight!

The soldiers in green behind my dad are rebels of Fidel Castro's army --  I remember when many of those soldiers would arrive triumphant in our hometown after the victory of Fidel Castro's revolution, and how my cousins and I would run to see them on the street and shake their hands: they were our heroes. They wore Catholic rosaries around their necks and looked like saints and holy hermits from some old painting or church retablo.  It wouldn't be long till some of those same rebels were obeying Castro's orders to execute many of their countrymen before firing squads -- without a fair trial.

In the painting, the small green suitcase behind "me" on the pavement in front of one of my sisters is also an important symbol. Two or three years after the Castro takeover, my parents sent my sisters to live with close family friends in Puerto Rico, to wait there for my parents and me  to leave the island  . . . . My sister's departure marked not only the breakup of my family in the larger sense, but a significant turning point in all our lives. This canvas recalls the day my sisters left Cuba, each carrying a doll.
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