My Background
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Raul & Pedro, Cuba 1997
Raul & Pedro, Cuba 1997
I was born in Guantanamo, Cuba on 30th November 1958 . My parents were farmers living in a deep verdant valley which was a four hour drive and a six hour walk from Guantanamo town. My father was Afro-Spanish and my mother native American Indian. I am the youngest of eleven children and was raised on the farm until my mother died when I was three. If she had lived my life would have evolved differently for they were self-sufficient and spent very little time away from the land. After her death my father and siblings managed until I was early school age and then, to help out, my father’s sister and her husband took me to live in Guantanamo with them.

Pedro and Juanica, my aunt and uncle, had led a different kind of life which involved ‘higher’ cultural and social expectations. Pedro was a well known musician and composer in Cuba and spent much of his life touring with his band performing the songs he had written. I still had a struggle to be allowed to follow the path towards being an artist but it was slightly easier with them than it might otherwise have been. There were, at that time in Cuba , misconceptions about what it meant to be an artist particularly around sexuality. My family wanted me to be a lorry driver or something similar, earn regular money and live a life acceptable to their society.

I hit plenty of obstructions; the first major one being when I was accepted at a special art school - I attended initially only for a short time because my aunt needed someone to do the shopping! I ended up leaving home at eleven and never really went back.

My first memories of that period are at a naval boarding school. Early on the teachers discovered my ability to draw and used to get me to do chalk illustrations of whatever they were teaching on the blackboards. At fourteen I won a scholarship to study navigation in Havana and it was here that I began to meet the artists and critics who were to form my future.

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