The Bubblegum Revolution
Miami May Ultimately Lose the Marlins, but It Could Gain Something Else
— a 90-Mile Art Bridge to Cuba

By Rebecca Wakefield

Julie Lara Kahn and Susan Caraballo knew that clearing customs at Miami International Airport would be interesting this past weekend. They were coming direct from Cuba and carried with them luggage that was decidedly odd even by the famously eclectic standards of MIA arrivals.

Among their possessions was a bag of long, curly black hair that a Mexican woman had shorn from her head in Havana in exchange for some packs of trading cards, the kind that come with sticks of gum. There was a paper image of the Virgin Mary, which a New York artist had kept secreted in her purse since the day her mother died. There were, among the hundreds of items in their bags, poems, songs, family photos, a doctor’s jacket, as well as government meal cards and underwear from both men and women.

All these items were bartered, one by one, on the Havana streets, for a slim pack of five cards depicting Cuban artists. Eight actors from the city’s Teatro El Público handled the transactions while costumed as cigarette girls and boys. The stunt was the conception of Miami-based artist Kahn, who did something quite similar here four years ago. During the first Art Basel in 2002, her cigarette peddlers sold packs of cards containing a random selection of Miami artists on a series of 88 trading cards. At subsequent trading parties, collectors could attempt to assemble an entire set. It was one of the cooler local offerings that year.

"‘You know how many people were executed there?’ I mean it was a fortress and they were using it as exhibition space.” — Susan Caraballo

For this year’s international art show Havana Bienal (March 27 to April 27), Kahn teamed with Miami arts curator Caraballo and two young Havana-based curators to create a series of 88 cards spanning the current Cuban art community. They didn’t want to sell the cards (partially because of the trade embargo), so they exchanged them for something of more sentimental value.

 “With Art Basel, I felt that the local art community was going to get swept way by this big art fair,” says Kahn, and the cards were a way of infiltrating the megashow. Beyond that, Kahn wanted to explore how people appraise objects and ideas. For instance, baseball cards used to be a sales gimmick for gum manufacturers. Now they’ve become a commodity unto themselves. On a larger scale, our community has wrestled with the social value of public funding for a baseball stadium and art museums.

Kahn has always been as much a sociologist as an artist, which makes her work accessible to art slummers like myself, who generally know more about the free wine selection at local galleries than the relative cultural value of the works they vend. Perhaps because Kahn’s background is so varied (she’s got an MBA from Harvard and has been an investment banker, record executive, disc jockey in Japan and a freelance producer for Annie Leibovitz), she likes doing things that break down the artificial barriers between art and the people who gawk at it. If she weren’t such a serious person, I’d say she just likes messing with people to see how they react.

In that context, bringing the project to Cuba made perfect sense. The island nation is a study in contrasts and ironies and paradoxes, as is Miami. The first day, for instance, they walked through La Cabaña, the fortress and prison Che Guevara once used as his revolutionary headquarters. “My father later told me, ‘If those walls could talk,’” Caraballo, a Cuban-American, says. “‘You know how many people were executed there?’ I mean it was a fortress and they were using it as exhibition space.”

The idea of the project, a sort of Basel meets Bienal, was to provide a snapshot of the Cuban art community at a moment in time. That aspect interested Caraballo, who has participated in other cultural exchanges between Cubans and Cuban Americans. “The idea of bringing Cuban artists here is rather difficult right now,” she admits, “but I would like to bring their work and ideally them too, down the line.”

The state of Florida and Miami-Dade County, in a progressive leap forward from the era of the local Cuba ordinance (banning funding to any organization doing business with or traveling to the island), provided some of the grant money. Kahn and Caraballo flew over with about 3,500 packs of cards. For four days last week, the actors wandered galleries and streets, trading items and the stories that went with them. They also hired a two-man camera crew to shoot video that Kahn will edit when she exhibits the collected items and the cards during Art Basel Miami Beach in December.

Kahn acknowledges that any project involving Cuba will have political considerations, but that was not her main intent. She wanted to get beyond the embargo to the connections underlying the indigenous art communities in both Havana and Miami. “It wasn’t about [the embargo],” she says. “It became more human than that… about generosity and risk taking. It’s more about the isolation of contemporary life than the politics of both places. It’s been really powerful the way people embraced it.”

One thing that surprised the pair from Miami was that island Cubans really know their local artists and they were enthusiastic about the cards. I doubt most Miamians could name anyone but Romero Britto, the ubiquitous local commercial success whose work developers insist on inflicting on our public spaces. More Cubans than art-buying tourists traded their personal effects. “That surprised us because we thought that in Cuba possessions are so valuable, they wouldn’t want to give them up,” Caraballo muses. “We were wrong. Julie had gotten paper and pens because her idea was people could trade a poem or a story. People sang and danced, recited poems. Some guy started stripping.”

Someone submitted a Cuban peso, on which they had written, in Spanish, “This is worthless.”

One question I had was how the Cuban government looked at this project. Did you have to give an entire set of trading cards to Fidel, I wondered? After all, he is a big baseball fan. “No, surprisingly, they didn’t ask us for the entire set,” Caraballo says, adding that they were nervous about how the government would view some of the answers the artists gave to the irreverent fill-in-the-blank questions printed on the back of the cards.

Artists answered the questions in ways banal, mysterious, silly, hopeful and even slyly seditious. One question starts out La Habana es... Liudmila and Nelson, an artist couple who specialize in photography-based work, finished the sentence this way – lo que será. Havana is what it will be. What does that mean? Only the artists know, but I like to think that the sentiment applies equally well to Miami, a place always in process of becoming.

This Friday there will be an exhibition in Havana of all 88 cards. They are also displayed on the project’s Web site, www.openseasonhavana.com, where potential collectors can trade them through an online forum. Kahn also intends to offer more cards to arts patrons during Basel.

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.