Arturo Montoto spent six years in Moscow, painting, studying Russian, and sitting through endless classes in Marxist theory. He came to understand that Cuba had somehow invented its own form of communism, one that was different from the Soviet system in both substance and spirit. It wasn’t simply that Cuba was considered part of the nonaligned movement, or that Fidel had just assumed leadership of that group. The two countries operated in fundamentally different ways. Although the Communist Party of Cuba held supreme power, Cuba was being run according to the personal ideology of Fidel Castro and his family. Some called it castrismo, and others just got used to saying, “this thing.” It was a mash-up of socialist concepts shaped by Fidel’s obstinate will. Havana took money from Moscow, lots of it, but Fidel rarely took orders from the Kremlin.
His first few months in Moscow were so depressing and stressful that Arturo was nearly hospitalized. Things turned around for him when he fell in love with a fellow art student, a Russian woman whose name was Elena, just like his mother. Before he finished his first full year at Surikov, his girlfriend gave birth to their daughter, who they also named Elena. He turned thirty while in Moscow and was expected to move up from the Young Communist League that he had belonged to for seventeen years to the Communist Party of Cuba. Just as he’d understood the benefits of belonging to the party when he was thirteen, he knew that membership would help make his career as an artist more secure. Few options were available for a young Cuban artist at that time. The Cuban art market barely existed, and the only painters whose work sold had made their reputations long before the revolution—and even they weren’t earning much. “We didn’t have any pretensions about being famous artists or making a lot of money,” he recalled. “We just focused on learning as much as we could about art. We wanted to get better at what we were doing.” The only practical career path was teaching, and belonging to the Communist Party would give him a head start on a position with prestige to equal his training and expertise. But he’d seen too much, from the attempt to entrap the art students who practiced yoga to the constant surveillance he’d lived under in Moscow, to remain loyal to an ideology he found abhorrent. When Cuban officials asked him to explain why he wanted to leave the party after it had done so much for him, he told them that, frankly, joining the Young Communist League had been a mistake, one he sincerely regretted.
He returned to Cuba in 1984 without his Russian girlfriend, his Russian daughter, or his Communist Party membership card. He also had no clear expectation of what lay in his future. Like other students who came back to Cuba with their foreign degrees, he had to wait for the government to give him a job. When he heard from the state, he was given a choice of teaching art to elementary school children in the province of Camagüey, in the center of the country, or on the Isle of Pines, off the southern coast, which the government had renamed Isle of Youth. Acting with the kind of presumptuousness typical of Cubans, he refused to take either position. “I don’t want you to think that I am vain or thinking too much of myself,” he told his superiors. In Moscow he’d been awarded the official title of muralist, the only Cuban so honored, and he felt he was overqualified to teach art to young children. He agreed wholeheartedly that it was important for them to learn to appreciate art, but plenty of others who hadn’t spent six years at Surikov could help them do that.
Because of special indulgences that Cuba afforded some artists, he won that battle, but he did not get the prestigious position he thought he deserved. He was sent to work taking photographs for a school in Havana where he also was expected to teach photography to the children. It was far from the painting that was his passion, but having turned down the other positions, he had little choice but to accept this one and get on with his life. But first he needed to find a place to live.
He had no desire to go back to Pinar del Río, and he couldn’t get into student housing at the art school. The heart of Havana was already so overcrowded with people pouring in from the provinces that it was impossible to find a decent place to live and work. He decided to join his younger brother, Juan, who was living opposite Old Havana in a curiosity shop of a town called Guanabacoa that reminded him of the Fenix neighborhood in Pinar del Río, where the city and the countryside met. In Guanabacoa, one of Havana’s fifteen boroughs, he found colonial churches, formal town squares, and, on the outskirts, acres of subsistence farms. And yet he was close enough to get to Havana, where he worked, even if it took a long time.
Guanabacoa had been absorbed bureaucratically into the capital decades earlier, but it very much remained apart from what Havana represented. Nestled among modest hills so rich in minerals that, in the early nineteenth century, they caught the attention of Alexander von Humboldt as he explored Cuba, the town was almost as old as Havana itself. Throughout its history, Guanabacoa had been overshadowed by its world-famous neighbor, but being second didn’t mean it was without pretension. In the early sixteenth century, it was known as “el pueblo de Indios de Guanabacoa” (the indigenous community of Guanabacoa). Historians believe it consisted of a small group of native Taino who had survived the cruelty and diseases of the Spanish conquistadors, along with stragglers from other tribes from the Yucatan peninsula and Florida. In 1555, when Havana was attacked by the French pirate Jacques de Sores, the seat of government in Cuba was briefly moved to Guanabacoa, giving rise to the saying, “Like putting Havana in Guanabacoa,” which Cubans use when someone tries to stuff something too big into a space too small. The town liked to brag about its role in major events in Cuban history, ranging from the 1762 invasion of Cuba by the British—when its mayor, known as Pepe Antonio, led local residents to block the advancing British troops—to the vicious street fighting in the uprising against Batista. Its streets inspired Rita Montaner, one of Cuba’s most popular singers, and Ernesto Lecuona, a classical composer. The popular entertainer known as Bola de Nieve grew up not far from the center of town. Despite its colorful history, few tourists or national politicians ventured there, and its eccentric mix of African secret societies and Christian religions, along with two Jewish cemeteries, made it a symbol of the complexity of Cuban culture. Even after it lost its seacoast in a 1976 restructuring, and its ancient urban core became sadly neglected, it was officially designated part of Cuba’s historic patrimony.
Arturo settled into a small shack he built in a rough section of town where the streets were not paved, roosters greeted the dawn, and rum flowed more reliably than the municipal water supply. He was an outsider to his neighbors, most of whom hadn’t gone to school past the ninth grade. But he appreciated the simplicity of their lives, and they respected him. When, after a few years, he took a position teaching painting at the Superior Institute of Art he once attended, his neighbors started calling him “El Profe,” the professor.
He taught and painted, and they left him alone. Then one evening, on his way back from class, he passed an outdoor gathering and heard someone calling him. “Profe, come here.” He had stumbled into a nominating session for a local election. Cuba had recently revamped its contrived electoral system so that, at the local level where there was very little power, candidates for the largely ceremonial post of ward leader were nominated in neighborhood meetings.
We think you should run, they told him. He shook his head no, his long, uncombed hair twisting from side to side. “Look at me,” he said. He was the model of a bohemian artist, just slightly better dressed than the legendary Gentleman of Paris who roamed downtown Havana in a cape and rags until he died in 1985. Arturo’s pants were baggy, his shoes scuffed and worn, and his attitude toward the Castro government anything but loyal. “You don’t want me,” he said.
But they insisted. One of his neighbors raised his hand and asked for permission to speak. “I propose El Profe.” The man described Arturo in vague terms that offended no one and were only partially true, calling him a fine artist who had graduated from a fancy foreign art school, a patriot, and a true revolutionary. Not a word was mentioned about his actual political views, which were anything but aligned with Castro’s regime. With a unanimous show of hands, it was settled. Arturo Montoto became a candidate for delegate in the municipality of Guanabacoa. He had his photograph taken, and he provided facts for the single-page biography that was the only campaign literature any candidate was allowed to prepare. He could not hold any campaign rallies. He was prohibited from running ads in the newspaper, and he was not given any opportunity to appear on TV to outline any program. In this version of Cuban elections, voters had to make their decision solely on the biographies posted at the voting places.
People on the committee who tallied the votes told Arturo that actually he had gotten the most votes. But you have to understand, they told him, that it was important for the sitting delegate to stay in office.
Arturo was relieved. He would have made a terrible delegate; he knew that. He never thought of himself as qualified to represent his neighbors, but he felt accepted by the town’s residents and was impressed by its culture and history. When he was approached by the Guanabacoa Municipal Museum to take photographs for an architectural history project, he jumped at the chance. Even as Guanabacoa was transformed into a center of light industry in the twentieth century, it retained many of its historic buildings and long-standing traditions. From the municipal building, facing the Central Park, up to where it meets the Vía Blanca, José Martí Avenue—the most important street in town—was lined with historic buildings, many with architecturally significant facades. María Eugenia López Rossitch, a local architect whose family had owned a factory in Guanabacoa before the revolution, had been hired to survey building styles along Martí. Her work would serve as a blueprint for preserving Guanabacoa’s heritage, at one time considered to be as rich as that of Trinidad, a colonial gem in Cuba’s south that was designated a UNESCO world heritage site in 1988. Arturo took photographs of the buildings to accompany her architectural assessments. Working together so closely, they struck up a personal relationship that led to marriage. They settled not quite in the city, and not quite in the countryside.
In Guanabacoa.