When diplomatic relations were restored with Cuba just over a year ago, it was welcome news for Neli Santamarina, long known in Miami’s Cuban-American community as an opponent of the Cuban embargo – and now a rising presence in the Vero Beach arts scene.
Word came in December of commercial flights resuming in a matter of months, and now Santamarina is putting together an April trip to Havana with Vero Beach Museum of Art photography instructor Aric Attas. Their hope is to sign up 30 Vero residents to visit and photograph old Havana before the anticipated wave of tourists descends.
“The impact is completely inevitable. It’s happening as we speak,” Santamarina says.
Santamarina is the owner of Len-mar plaza on Old Dixie downtown, home to the alternative co-op gallery Project Space 1785, of which Attas is part. She has just opened a second gallery space next door with an emphasis on Cuban art, hoping to spur interest in the island among Vero residents.
“This is a way to go and meet people and not be on a pre-packaged tour,” says Attas, who has a degree in psychology from Hobart College and a masters in fine art in photography from the Hartford Art School. Last March, he appeared on Ovation TV’s art-oriented travel show “American Canvas,” giving photography tips in Miami’s Wynwood arts district. The trip runs April 6-12 at a cost of $3,500 to $4,000 per person including air fare, lodging and some meals.
“There’s been such a homogenization of our culture – Soho is now like every other mall in America. In Havana, it’s still relatively untouched. The tourists are there, but the infrastructure isn’t yet in place to accommodate the kind of change that would flip a switch and have a Starbucks at every corner. But at some point the little window where you walk up and get your coffee is going to be a Starbucks.”
The group will travel on an American Airlines charter from Miami, though it won’t be long before commercial flights will be making the same trip. Just before Christmas, an agreement was reached between Cuban and U.S. officials to do just that. With the paperwork now in the process of translation, carriers are lining up for the anticipated 20 flights a day to Havana, expected to begin within six months.
When that happens, Cuba will be straining to accommodate the influx of tourists. Santamarina is friends with an attorney who represents Airbnb in Cuba. He told her that since the company first began to operate in Havana in April 2015, it’s become one of the fastest growing markets for the company. “Airbnb came into Havana and in less than two weeks, 2,000 people signed up, more than any city that they serve in the world.”
Depending on the size of the Vero group, they may be able to take advantage of some of those sign-ups and enjoy the authenticity of a stay in private homes. As it is, the group is planning to stay in a recently renovated 1950s-era high-rise luxury hotel, the Capri, built by the Mafia and once owned by Tampa mobster Santo Trafficante Jr.
With mornings spent under Attas’ tutelage, afternoons and evenings will exploit Santamarina’s numerous contacts in Havana, developed over the dozen or so trips she has made in the last eight years.
On the agenda: a walking tour with an architect who works with Eusebio Leal, historian of old Havana who has overseen its restoration; dinner along El Malecón – Havana’s famous esplanade and seawall – at the home of Juanito Delgado Calzadilla, who organized the vast exhibit “Detrás del Muro” during the 2012 Biennial art fair. And, most importantly, access to the vistas of everyday life, like the image Santamarina describes from her last visit, of a young girl appearing one morning on the balcony of a crumbling building, laughing and dancing to music blaring, and inviting Santamarina in for a cafécita. “You never say no. I never say no.”
A native of Cuba’s westernmost province, Pinar el Rio, where her father’s family grew tobacco, Santamarina moved to Miami just before she turned 8, and just before the revolution. When her mother became pregnant, she and her sister returned with her in August 1960 for the birth of Neli’s brother. By December, though, they were back in the States after realizing the political climate under the “good-looking, charming, brilliant” Castro turned out to be as untenable as that under the dictator he deposed.
Santamarina didn’t see her homeland again until the age of 54, on a 2007 tour led by her sister Carmen.
That was five years after she discovered Vero Beach. A longtime Miami real estate broker, she scouted the eventual home of Gloria and Emilio Estefan, her close friends.
Santamarina’s first friend in Vero was broker Cindy O’Dare, who called her when a small motel on the cul-de-sac off Vero’s South Beach went on the market. Santamarina bought it, renaming it South Beach Place. She and her friends and family are now frequent visitors there, and she has gone on to invest in commercial properties downtown.
Santamarina hopes to do the same in Cuba, as soon as properties become available for purchase. “I want this there,” she says, waving her arm across the tropical grounds of the Vero motel.
That first visit to Havana had proved transformative, says Santamarina. Once a student of political science with an emphasis on Latin America at Florida International University, she remains intensely interested in politics.
“I became aware that there was a lot of distortion of information on both sides, on the Cuba side and the Miami side. I decided I want to see this with my own eyes, I want to hear it with my own ears, not through the Miami news stations, only through me, my brain.”
Vowing to go back “as often as I could for the rest of my life,” her visits have accelerated since President Obama’s announcement. In the past year, she has returned six times.
As for Attas, it is his first trip. He is lured by the authenticity of Havana, frozen in time under Communist rule. Built by the Spanish beginning in the 16th century, old Havana is rife with photographic opportunities. But Attas, whose courses at the museum and at the Center for Spiritual Care aim to “expand the artistic vision,” wants his students to find much more to shoot than the stereotypical shots we see in magazines – “the old guy with the cigar in front of the old car,” as he says.
His idea is to give assignments – to shoot only textures. for example – that will serve to narrow his students’ options; such restraints, he says, will force them to dip into the same resourcefulness that Cubans themselves have tapped for years.
“I believe that we have a file cabinet of ‘good pictures’ in our minds,” he says. “You’re walking and you see something and you say, Oh, that would be a good picture.’ But is that something you’ve already pre-approved? I’m interested in seeing things in a new way and embracing them as influences in your trajectory as an artist.”
