Why travel to Cuba?

Of course, our focus was the Bienal. The Bienal is not a meat market like so many art fairs in the USA. The artists are accessible, want to talk about their work, not engaged thru their dealers. The work is smart, colorful, dizzying in variety and essentially wherever you are in the city.The works are about ideas and issues not always given much attention in a capitalist art market.It spills into the streets and is there for all, not just the cognescenti. It has guts.

But even if the Bienal and its art would disappear, Cuba calls. It is not the Disneyworld experience of fun and fantasy. It is not the Europe experience of famous monuments seen from a tour bus. You are in it. Everything is an experience--eating, taxi rides, walking, standing in line, sitting and watching. In Havana Vieja you walk the streets hardly more than a few feet from someone's living room. You are in the now and in the 1950's at the same time. The colonial buildings are both remodeled and crumbling. If you go to the national school of the arts, an exceptional institution, and you want to eat lunch with the students, you have to bring your won spoon.

Havana is socialist and entrepreneurial at the same time. It is vibrant and crumbling. It is vibrant and blaring rhythms and somber economics. Cuba is contradictions at every turn. Go.