The Story of the Painting

Is not the most exciting, but Thursday is chemo day (not mine, thank God) and I feel like telling it.

Born in Brooklyn, I grew up in Staten Island, NY. I cannot tell you what it was like to be the single Hispanic, let alone Cuban. When I was very young, you could count the number of Cubans in any geographic radius on your fingers. Even as I was growing up, we didn’t really have access to cool Cuban stuff, so unless you were going to lay the island of Cuba in gravel on your front lawn- which someone I know actually did- you were stuck with “Kiss me, I’m Irish” shirts.

An American friend once complained that no one in Miami spoke English. I laughed and told her that when I got off the plane in Miami, I felt like I was in my native country, a feeling of belonging I experienced nowhere else. Recently in response to a post, I wrote to Alberto de la Cruz that I envied him his childhood near Calle Ocho. And I do.

On one of my trips to Miami in the late 80’s, I was in a cafeteria, making inroads into my pan con lechon, when I noticed the artwork on the walls. “Wow”, I thought “How cool is that.” I was particularly taken with a lone elderly figure in a cape. “Oh, him,” my mother said, “he was a famous figure in Havana, El Caballero de Paris.”
“I’d love to have something like that,” I said.

My aunt called me a few weeks later that she had tracked down the twin sisters, the Sculls, to a studio on Washington, which was still pretty seedy at the time. Was I still interested? So I asked, sight unseen, for a painting that showed a typical Cuban scene. The building in the background is the Capitol, modeled on the US Capitol, which itself has roots in classicism. The gentleman with the numbers is selling lottery tickets to an old woman who is lowering a bag for her purchase. She lives in what my mother calls a cuarteria. On the right is the aforementioned gentleman bearing a rose before him. It is intriguing that a homeless man seized the imagination of all who saw him making his rounds and was so well known throughout the island.

And that is the story of the painting. Click on the links on this one. They are fascinating.