Cuba: The Art Revolution: Challenging Fidel's socialist system

Length: 13:50

This film has been edited slightly at the request of Los Carpinteros because of political safety issues in Cuba.

Cuba has a long and rich heritage in the arts, but during the last two decades, the visual arts have become a cultural phenomenon. In this week's Rough Cut, filmmaker Natasha Del Toro travels to Cuba to meet two of its most acclaimed artists as well as others who make a good living selling their art to tourists in Havana.

In a nation that prides itself on its government-sponsored public art education and thriving cultural centers, Del Toro discovered that art is at the center of Cuban society. "In the absence of a free press, the arts have become a space through which people can observe and debate the social issues of the day," says Del Toro.

Although Fidel Castro originally intended to use art to spread socialist ideals, the government loosened its censorship on art in the early 1990s, when Cuba's top artists began to leave the country. Cuba's art market really took off after Castro legalized the dollar and opened the island up to tourism in the mid-1990s.

New artists, such as Los Carpinteros (The Carpenters) -- the charismatic duo at the heart of Del Toro's film -- filled the void left by departing artists and began to create innovative sculptures, paintings and installations that cleverly critiqued the socialist system. Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodriguez, who make up Los Carpinteros, still live and work in Havana, but they have achieved tremendous success abroad.

You can find their work in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art, and their pieces can fetch $50,000 or more at auction -- an astonishing sum for anyone living in Castro's Cuba. As Del Toro's film reveals, it has given the two men a status and lifestyle few other Cubans could imagine. Successful artists can earn far more than the average Cuban doctor or lawyer, creating an almost feverish will to succeed among Cuba's next generation of artists.

For their part, Los Carpinteros never dreamed their work would sell for such high amounts. "The first time someone asked us how much our artwork cost, we didn't know what to respond," Rodriguez says. "We didn't have a price because we didn't even know someone could buy something like that."

The fact that Cuba has been notably off limits to Americans for so long has only fueled the success of Cuba's art market. "Cuban art has been in such high demand because it's so hard to get," says Del Toro. "People from abroad want to buy this art because it's politically charged and exotic."

Los Carpinteros' latest exhibition toured several American cities earlier this year, but for the first time, Castillo and Rodriguez weren't given visas to travel with their show until the tour was well under way. Ironically, it wasn't the Cuban government who delayed their travel, but the U.S. government's tightening restrictions on Cubans visiting its shores.

Sonia Narang
Associate Interactive Producer