While Cuba Waits: Art From the Nineties
Reviewed by Peter Landau

As the century closes on the socialist experiment in the Caribbean, there's not much to show for it but old cars, dilapidated buildings, and hookers. Adventuresome Americans can venture to the land of Ricky Ricardo through loopholes in travel restrictions, such as the neutral portal of Jamaica. But instead of an "I Love Lucy" paradise they find stoned hustlers and cheap women looking for a quick greenback fix to fill the wizened nipple of Soviet Russian subsidies long since run dry.

There is beauty, too, if your idea of art is decay. Time stopped around mid-century, making Cuba a retro-treasure chest for swinging hipsters with a kitsch hangover. However, if the truly bold take a deeper expedition into the heat of Havana they will find a community of artists producing work not dissimilar to that of more affluent capitalist trendsetters in galleries from New York to London.

While Cuba Waits, published by Smart Art Press to accompany an exhibition by the Track 16 Gallery, hopes to dispose the myth of the green-fatigued, cigar-toting, bearded political revolutionaries more commonly associated with that tropical isle. Overt communist propaganda is happily missing, though many of the works are politically pointed. More often the nearly unreadable text delivers the dull social relevance, but that can be easily avoided.

The book is broken up into five sections, including essays, artist pages, and a Spanish translation. Throughout the essays, which provide some interesting background on the individual artists represented in the volume, there are excruciatingly small reproductions of works. The modern reader is tempted to scroll a cursor over the image and double-click for a close-up, only such conveniences can't be used in Gutenberg's old medium. But this is no coffee-table tome. The smarty-pants prose,littered with unnecessary exclamation points and annoying rhetorical questions, force feeds dogma when the focus should be showcasing an interesting group of contemporary artists.

The Cuban art doesn't make a decent appearance until well past the halfway mark. Each artist is given a couple of pages in which they can write something about themselves or their work while displaying their wares. The work is surprisingly familiar. For a country that has been so cut off and isolated from the United States, every artist featured in "While Cuba Waits" can draw a direct line to some modern American craftsman.

Pedro Alvarez creates colorful and picturesque canvases that segment space and time with an expressive brushstroke and classic composition. His work echoes everyone from the cartoon mayhem of Robert Williams' surreal paintings to the play of form and style seen in David Salle's work. Sandra Ceballos' graphic use of right angles and scripted words reads like a rejected New Yorker cover bySaul Steinberg. While Douglas Perez appears to have channeled the same racist muse that Robert Crumb successfully mined in the late 1960s to ridicule the hypocritical Left.

Not that all the work is derivative. And even when blatantly wearing its influences, the pieces have merit. Still, it is those creations that are wholly an extension of theartists' unique perspective that ultimately deserve recognition. Yalili Mora's eerie paintings of people's legs, painstakingly copied from photographs and rendered in a realistic,monochromatic tone, reveal a power in the mundane that says more about the population and conditions of Cuba than the thousands of words that pad the front of this book.