The Crab, the Crocodile, and Love in Cuba

In an outlying district of Havana called Jaimanitas, the artist José Fuster has created an ever-expanding outdoor artwork consisting of mosaic sculpture, murals, fanciful arches, ceramic roosters and dozens of painted staring eyes.  The name of this place is The Jaimanitas Project.  English filmmaker Sylvie Collier just produced The Crab, the Crocodile, and Love in Cuba, a film about this visionary collaboration.  I saw the movie's US debut, at the Puffin Foundation in Teaneck, New Jersey.

Though Fuster's entire artwork lauds the revolution, it doesn't resemble political art as we know it.  There are no images of Che, for example.  And the artist's symbol of Cuba is a goofy-looking crocodile, which has an improvised style (he explains) because "Cuba itself is unfinished."  He makes no clear distinction between political commitment, whimsy and a childlike love of animals.  "We should thank the cows," Fuster explains -- and at one point he happily rides one of his cement horses.

As Fuster is an internationally-known artist, he can "sell his art in the capitalist world," as he puts it, and reinvest everything in his mammoth vision -- which essentially means in his friends and neighbors.  As his artwork organically expands, neighboring families agree to participate -- he extends his mosaic mural to cover their walls -- and asks them which images they prefer.  One man wishes his house to be named after Maria, his wife, and "Maria" appears, spelled out in tiles, in the plaster.

Fuster is unashamed of his influences, though the only one he mentions is Picasso.  Others I noticed are the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi, the surrealist Joan Miro, and self-taught artist Howard Finster, who created the "Plant Farm Museum" in his backyard in Pennville, Georgia.  The closest American artform to Fuster's work is the theme park, with its surprising views, communal tours and outdoor setting.  Visitors constantly pass through his evolving installation.

"I'm going to build the largest mural in the world," José announces matter-of-factly, "with the help of many other artists."  Ceramicists, some from Europe and the U.S., supplied tiles which his workers embedded in a long wall.

Several men work for Fuster -- sometimes for free, when his money runs out.  The sculptor puts his arm around one inarticulate-looking working-class guy, Olvis Lobaina, saying: "This man is the soul of the project!"  Among his other talents, Fuster is a brilliant community organizer.

This artist has a fine organic sense of form, but he tends to resolve a composition the easy way.  The Jaimanitas Project pushes him always to think harder.  This sculptor needs his neighbors to evolve.  (Actually, we all do.)

Because the art here is created cheerfully, communally and is sometimes improvised, we assume it's flimsy.  But Cubans are not hippies.  Fuster's structures are surprisingly sturdy, like Cuban Communism itself.  When the foundation it was built on -- the Soviet Union -- crumbled, Cuba created an even stronger structure.

Collier's camera subtly emphasizes the minute intellectual decisions behind each metal rod being hacksawed, each new trowelful of mortar that is slathered.  She never directly says that The Jaimanitas Project is a metaphor for Cuba, but the film's "plot" does.  At first the focus is on the art, but near the end, Collier interviews residents of Jaimanitas about Communism, and its future.

"We Cubans are an anti-imperialist people," a middle-aged woman shyly tells the camera.  How I wish I lived among anti-imperialist people!

Fuster is, in a sense, to the left of Communism.  He worships Fidel, because he was a poor boy of twelve when the Revolution came, and suddenly had the chance to attend art school.  (Beginning in 1963, Fuster studied at the Escuela Nacional de Instructores de Arte in Havana. )  But he envisions an even more dynamic and inclusive society than present-day Cuba.

Sylvie Collier keeps the camera in motion -- we never see a static shot of the entire project -- and emphasizes the similarities between the art and the swinging, virtuosic Cuban music.  Fuster paints his canvases with swift, spontaneous strokes, almost exactly the same way a guitarist in the last scene improvises, using a bottle of rum as a capo.  Silvio Rodriguez's rhapsodic song "En Busca de un Sueno" ("In Search of a Dream") becomes a theme of the film.  A secret pun lurks just beneath the surface: Fuster is a Cuban cubist.

"My neighbors and I are very rich," Fuster explains.  "We have an excellent healthcare system, first-rate education.  We have everything but money.  And I am even richer, because I have my art!"

The entire film is in Spanish, with subtitles.