CULTURE
The ‘Picasso of the Caribbean,’ Cuban artist José Fuster expands artistic vision to cover an entire neighborhood
Living with Art in Cuba
Art is alive and well in today’s Cuba, and none is more visible and provocative than the work of José Rodríguez Fuster, who displays his modernistic work on a very public scale. Fuster is one of Cuba’s most original ceramists and popular painters. He began his career at age 14 when he traveled to the Sierra Maestra to teach in Cuba’s Literacy Campaign. He later studied at the Art Instructors School and began working as a ceramist at the Cubanacán Ceramics Workshop in Havana in 1966.
During his early years, he visited Europe, where he was impressed by the surreal works of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona and Constantin Brâncusi in Romania, which helped define his modern cubist style and led to him being dubbed the “Picasso of the Caribbean.”
Fuster’s paintings are filled with abstract impressions of Cuban life reflecting his pride in his country and countrymen, and his love of the sea. A number pay tribute to events that marked his adolescence, including the Cuban Revolution and the campaign to teach people to read and write. (Today Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates in the Caribbean.) FUSTERLANDIA To say that Fuster is passionate about his work would be to sorely understate what he has accomplished. In 1994, he went to live in the small fishing village of Jaimanitas just outside Havana (by his own fanciful account, swimming after a mermaid) and set about expanding his artistic vision.
To make his studio-workshop a place where he could “live with art,” he covered almost every square inch of it with his whimsical creations, most evident in large works of ceramic tile. Then, using his own money, made by selling his sculptures and paintings, he began to expand his vision and ceramic artworks to include his neighbors’ homes and the surrounding neighborhood, as part of a community project called “The Joy of Living.”
Today, large sections of Jaimanitas are adorned with Fuster’s audacious ceramic mosaic tile art. The result is a distinctive and popular world of fantasy known as Fusterlandia, which gives visitors the impression of wandering into a Tim Burton movie, and which is constantly growing like artistic kudzu.
Megasize ornate murals and domes, incorporating bold splashes of color, depict Cuban society and are designed to suit
the personality of his neighbors. The surreal villagescape contains an odd but pleasing mix of Beetlejuice- like scenes, ranging from giant roosters, entwined arms and mermaids to depictions of popular saints and tributes to Cuban heroes. The local doctor home-surgery is colored a deep blue and crowned with an enormous red heart; a giant hand pays tribute to the Miami Five (Cuban intelligence officers arrested in Miami in 1998 and viewed as national heroes by the Cuban government); and a potbellied palm tree presides over a garden filled with outlandish ceramic animals.
A giant permanent Chess Retreat, where everything is checkered, is filled day and night with local players, and a large blue unicorn presides over a children’s park. One of the most extensive achievements of the Jaimanitas project is a long ceramic scene-covered wall that extends along the street opposite Fuster’s studio.
Fuster, who works with the local population to organize dozens of activities, has also built a theater, public swimming pools, and an artists’ wall composed of a quilt of dozens of tiles signed and donated by other Cuban artists.
Today, Fuster’s works are treasured and exhibited in galleries and in public, as well as in private institutions in several dozen countries.
To learn more about Fuster and Fusterlandia (in Spanish), go to josefuster.com. Glenn Ostle is a freelance photojournalist living in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was introduced to mind-blowing Fusterlandia during a peopleto-people trip to Cuba in 2015.
Fusterlandia gives visitors the impression of wandering into a Tim Burton movie.