It’s just a block or two off Quinta Avenida (Fifth Avenue) to Jaimanitas, a former fishing community on the northwest side of Havana. Our big tour bus hogs the narrow street lined with modest one- and two-story stucco houses. From behind the walls that bound the small yards, broad banana leaves lift and fall in the breeze, and palm fronds rustle, sounding a little like light rain. It could easily be the mid-1960s, and I could be riding in the Gulliver Academy van through one of the neighborhoods around the Orange Bowl, headed for my childhood home in Miami.
Then, we round a curve and all at once there’s a huge campesino, or farmer, in a big hat, spreading his arms wide in welcome. He’s made of cement and tiled with broken shards of glazed pottery that lend him a bold iridescence in the already-harsh late morning light. And he’s not alone. Everywhere we look, the walls around the yards, the facades and sides of houses, even some roofs are covered in wildly colored mosaics that depict palm trees, mermaids, roosters, crocodiles, crabs, human faces, individual eyes. Towers and spires have been added to some houses, and statues of birds and fish perch and leap atop walls and gateways.
If you’re familiar with Antoni Gaudí, the Catalon architect whose Park Güell in Barcelona also features extensive mosaics, you might be able to picture this. But add to Gaudí a particularly lush, Caribbean flair. Add influences of surrealism and cubism, historical figures from Cuban revolutionary history, and elements of the Afro-Cuban religion of Santería, which merges Catholic saints with the African gods that slaves brought to Cuba but the Spanish were forbidden to worship.
I’ve been a collector of beach glass, broken tiles, shards and other cast-off junk since I was a kid. One of the first things I found when I moved to Leyden in 1981 was a metal saltshaker that had corroded into an inexplicably beautiful small sculpture that still sits on my kitchen windowsill.
My husband turned to me, smiled, and asked what he knew was a rhetorical question: “Are you in heaven?”
In fact, we were in what some have called “Fusterlandia,” a sprawling work of art created over more than twenty years by Cuban artist José Rodriquez Fuster. Fuster, born in 1946 in a small fishing village on Cuba’s north coast, studied at Cuba’s National School for Art Instructors in the mid-1960s and went on to have a successful career as an artist, selling ceramics and paintings, and traveling widely throughout Latin America and Europe. More than 80 neighbors have let Fuster use their homes as canvases for his mosaics, and it seems — from peeking down side streets and into courtyards — many have taken up the work on their own.
My husband and I had the great luck to find ourselves in this enchanted fantasy land, because a friend had invited us to join a trip to Cuba sponsored by Teachers as Scholars, a Cambridge-based organization founded in 1996 by Henry Bolter. TAS is grounded in the idea that in order to succeed, K-12 teachers need not just take professional development courses on curriculum reform or teaching methods but become re-energized as learners themselves. To that end, TAS offers seminars at Boston-area colleges and universities, as well as international trips. The visit to Fuster’s studio and home was just one stop in our weeklong itinerary.
The guide who met us in the courtyard of Fuster’s home and studio was a childhood friend of Fuster’s named David. His friend had always wanted to create something large and outlandish, David said, ever since they were kids. But it wasn’t until he’d had some success as an artist — one of the few private enterprises allowed by the Cuban government — that Fuster was able to afford the materials to begin.
Fuster began the Jaimanitas project in 1995, midway into what is called “The Special Period” in Cuba, the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The ‘90s were a time of severe food and fuel shortages, power outages and general austerity, David said, and sometimes Fuster felt guilty for spending money on the tiles and other materials he needed. But neighbors were supportive. In some instances, homes were strengthened in the process of preparing walls or roofs for the mosaics. And working on the mosaics together created a sense of community. Fuster finally decided that there was value in putting smiles on peoples’ faces during tough times, David said.
There were certainly smiles — as well as expressions of amazement and disbelief — on the faces of our group. Out in the neighborhood, some locals were profiting from the tourists who had come to gawk. Two men sold “Cool Coconut Water” from a small stand, handing buyers a whole coconut with a straw sticking out. Other vendors sold straw hats and fans, Che Guevara medallions, Cuban flags or bracelets ingeniously shaped from old forks and spoons.
But others in the neighborhood just went about their day. Across the street from Fuster’s studio, a man swept the sidewalk in front of his home, while down the street, some women and kids waited for the bus. A group of men strolled by, talking and smoking cigarettes. These were the people I marveled at, the ones who just happened to live inside a work of art, the ones who didn’t call the neighborhood “Fusterlandia;” they just called it home.
To find out more about José Rodriquez Fuster, visit:
havana-cultura.com/en/visual-arts/jose-fuster or
/www.cubanartspace.net/Fuster/fuster.php
To find about more about Teachers as Scholars, visit: http://www.teachersasscholars.org