Today in El Agitador -The Stirrer -, we interview Elio Beltran, a Cuban artist that in addition, is a descendant caspolino from his father line. After leaving his country in 1960, a year and one half after the coming to power of Fidel Castro, he decided to travel to the United States and at the present time is in Ormond Beach, Florida, where he has been working to produce new oils for the exhibition of his works entitled “What Flows from Spain” that has been organized by the St. Augustine Arts Association, to open in the month of April of this year 2013 in the celebration of the 500 anniversary of the discovery of Florida. In the same venue they are also preparing to celebrate the 450 anniversary of St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States, founded by Spain in 1565. An event where this painter will also participate. Today we make a review of the most important stages of his life.
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Where were you born and what exactly your ancestors linking the town of Caspe?
I was born on December 3, 1929 in Regla, lively and interesting town where you can see the capital of Cuba, Havana, from any point in its maritime coast in the bay, as well as from several beautiful hills that around them. A town that very early in its history was important industrially for its springs, and because there was built a powerful electricity generating plant led to a considerable industrial boom since the late nineteenth century. Rule There, in Regla ran for the first time in Cuba, the first tram, which later came to form a beautiful picture of the city. That first tram driver accidentally was first operated by my beloved maternal grandfather, Don Jose Maria Marrero and Perez, a descendant of a family in the Canary Islands.
It is well known that Cuba is one of the nations of America has always had closer ties with Spain, and that is why we Cubans always very lit in our hearts to the Motherland. It can be said that there are only few Cubans who does not take Spanish ancestry with pride. For me, this feeling is absolutely rooted and, moreover, my paternal grandfather, Jose Beltran Manero, Aragones, was born in Caspe nothing less than the mid-1840.
Apparently, for reasons of fire during the Carlist wars, or who knows when, the family of my paternal great-grandmother, surnamed Manero, could not find even in Caspe records the date he got his birth certificate. The knowledge I had of him was that my father told me, because I do not know, and who died shortly before my birth.
His story could be the subject for a book. He received a bayonet wound in the stomach during some of the riots of the time, while spending his youth in Zaragoza. He went home and slept with one hand on the wound without saying anything. Luckily his mother realized it, and could hide and treat his wounds. A few weeks later, she dressed him as a girl of the age to come out surreptitiously on a ship that sailed from Barcelona, full of soldiers to the war in Cuba.
He landed in Manzanillo, on the south coast of the Eastern Province of the island, where he met my grandmother, Mrs. Ursula native cuban, surname, Gonzalez Gonzalez, whom he married. They had 12 children, of whom the eldest was my father, Miguel Beltrán González, born in 1880 and an engineer by profession. At not a very advanced age of 63 died of kidney failure when I was only thirteen years old.
The grandfather was appointed sheriff of the town of my grandmother, Manzanillo, and was famous arresting criminals who he was going to get to the mountains, and bring them back from the mountains where they were hiding, passing them down the main street of the village, tied to each other by the ankles so they could not escape. He was later appointed head of supply in the warehouses of the Spanish army in the area. . As told by my father during the war in Cuba, the concentration camps of the rural population in the cities, imposed by the Spanish General Valeriano Weiler, caused great hardship among the population.
During that time, the grandfather was compassionate and helped prevent further disasters for which already caused food shortages in the population, which earned him the respect and appreciation of the general population.. At the end of the war in Cuba, was was reinstated in his position as manager of the city supplies. After winning its independence, the Cuban leaders were not vindictive with the Spaniards who remained in the island, many of which were almost immediately or within a few years, important business assets of all kinds, mainly in the a food industry trade and construction products, hardware, transport and distribution. This contributed to the remarkable progress in such fields as education and health with great institutions, helping to create from scratch new generations of professionals, especially in medicine, which has always traditionally been a very prominent feature in Cuba from colonial times.
I can say that besides my Spanish ancestry, I also feel very fortunate to have grown up in the environment of my beloved town of Regla, and that unlike other towns had everything we could want about me, especially during the ages of nine to fourteen years, and that there were places for the adventures of the boys of that age.
What are your memories of childhood in Regla ?
To give an idea of the surroundings, when leaving the house where I was born in October 10 street No. 9, called La Calzada , just 30 meters railway station was a large and important industrial railroad station surrounded by the largest Havana docks where they were stored and shipped to the outside, tobacco, molasses and sugar yields were leading the country.There also was imported machinery, automobiles and industrial products of all kinds.
Places for excursions and adventures abound for children in an area of only about five square kilometers. Only 200 meters at the same Causeway October 10, the boys had a real cattle ranch, where cattle generated all the milk product consumed in the village. In addition there was a slaughterhouse where it came a large number of cattle attended by real cowboys who guarded them since they left the railroad to the large pens.
To reach the pens, ranchers drove the animals on horseback in the style of the American West, by an old alley covered by the many trees that had grown on both sides. The Frog Alley, as it was called, gave rise to a real Bulls run the neighborhood kids enjoyed as if it were a celebration of San Fermin in Pamplona. Risk, but ran quite skillfully youth cheering and quickly to protect ourselves in the thick sides of the narrow alley and climb up the trunks of the trees at full speed to avoid being rammed.
For the same areas we used to ride on cargo railroad trains in full swing, and go hunting and fishing lagoons, mangrove swamps and woods around the Martin Perez River, which flows into the inlet of Guasabacoa. That’s the name that was known to that part of the bay of Havana, where fishing was incredibly abundant in those days, in spotless waters. We all did swimming and sailing sports in the small fishing boats that we took care for them and used during the days that were available in their usual moorings. Or we went up the river or walking along the rail to pick up plenty of tropical fruits, as delicious mangos, hanging from trees along the road for twenty miles over a long stretch of property near the area of Santa Maria del Rosario.
This corner of the bay of Havana, where I was born was also surrounded by hills full of bright quartz rough stone and blue streamers on their sides, in the cliffs and ravines where there was in those days very peculiar mountain goats jumping with great balance , moving up and down like a game. To make the area more interesting, at least for me it was always intensely aware of my surroundings, I also had a great nature with lush tropical fruit trees on the hillsides and many flowers around our neighborhood at the foot of what is called «La Loma», also known at the end of Frog Alley, where for certain nights indicated by its ritual, and in a secret initiation ceremony celebrating their organizations Abakua ancient Yoruba culture composed of members of African descent who had been brought from West Africa. Also some public celebrations were held in our street with true authenticity both in the way they dressed, and in the songs in the original language all done to the beat of Bata type African drums.
An interesting display of Afro-Cuban culture that eventually made a big contribution to the rhythms of our music that has reached levels of international enormous importance. All the richness of color and light in which I grew up was the basis for much of the inspiration that later I would be critical at the beginning of my vocation as a painter over the years.
And how you started to exploit the natural vocation for painting?
My interest and my natural inclination for art became apparent in my nine and twelve years demonstrating ability to draw. At that time I started making drawings such as vignettes drawn from memory in a notebook with the most important sequences of films of that era .I preferred the ones as Tarzan the Ape Man and other heroes of the space adventures of Flash Gordon or Roldan as the Bold.. This caught the attention of my teachers who commissioned me to draw pictures and posters to place on the walls during special celebrations of patriotic dates and events in schools. So I became one of the students preferred by Single Matilde a Professor at The School of Arts San Alejandro in Havana, who delighted in giving me some basis for drawing techniques that would help me later because I did not start painting Oil on my own to meet my twelve years of age. It was when a neighbor, high school student asked me if I could paint a new dress with Chinese motifs she wanted to celebrate her fifteenth birthday. I told her that I would if she was buying the oil paint and brushes, which she accepted gladly paying the equivalent of $ 35 at the time, which was not much for the daughter of a merchant entrepreneur came from Galicia. That was my first work of art that began over a period of five years after the death of my dear father in 1944 continuously helped me win some money with which to buy materials and books for my studies in secondary schools. It also served to begin technical studies to further industrial and technical graduate, helping my mother with some of my expenses.
When my father died, his brother Louis, who was closest to him, wanted to encourage me and help me to go to the School of Art of San Alejandro. But pretty silly, if not with arrogant ignorance, I said that I needed not to go to that which would influence me so that I could end up hating art, as had happened to many other fellow students who went to St. Alejandro, and that after starting there became quite disappointed and left school before graduating.
Not all did, of course, but many of them could only say that passed through the school. Although they always had the benefit of having done so and, in fact, know enough to be given to the discipline of the trade, which over time, some of them and they gave them good dividends for their education. Meanwhile I had to go through many difficulties to learn on my own, self-taught, with much more effort and time to get some expertise and earn some recognition in the longer term. So, that is why I have always recommended to all young talent not to do what I did, unless you have, as I have had quite liking to overcome challenges and obstacles. There is a danger of being defrauded by themselve if they do not show a true vocation for struggle with enough persistence. Althoug, it always helps if you have the ability to paint well, but unless you have a competitive spirit and great desire to reach a peak, it won’t be easily achieved, nor can it be easier in the short term that way.
What artists have influenced your career as an artist?
I have been inspired by many impressionist painters, especially Van Gogh, Pissarro and others in the same period. I think that is anticipated to Impressionism, and in some ways an early expressionism, which in some cases I consider as «semi-abstract, in a real but poorly defined nature» as in the case of the English painter, Turner, who later also served as inspiration to the pioneers of Impressionism as the aforementioned Pissarro and many others who left Paris to London fleeing Prussian war in the late nineteenth century. All this has inspired me a lot but in a much larger scale the work of the great Aragonese painter Francisco de Goya y Lucientes.
At the same time you learned the techniques of painting, you should continue your studies and begin the search for a job. How did you do it?
Much earlier, before starting to paint in oils when I was about six, my dear mother, Maria Antonia Marrero Albelo, took care of me always placing me with a private teacher to learn English. My father used to have learned this language during the first twelve years of the twentieth century when he lived, studied and worked as chief engineer in the construction of the railroad bridges between the states of New York and Pennsylvania, before returning to Cuba and marry my mother and have their only two sons, Miguel Angel, my older brother and then me. During those early days taking English lessons, my father served as a practice as my knowledge went. When I still had another year to my graduation and licensure as an industrial technician, the English language opened the door to a career in the oil industry with a job with the Anglo-Dutch Shell company in Cuba. There I received training as a technician for facilities management and the handling of liquefied petroleum gas, becoming by my 19th’s years the department head instructor of the distribution and installation of domestic gas, as assistant engineer first. And later also for industrial use, and I had to direct the first bulk installment for a new building in the Vedado area of Havana.
After five years in that occupation I marry Margarita Rivero Ruiz, the daughter of an electrician engineer, from my own town, and then have only my two daughters. Then followed six years as regional manager who I completed six months after the intervention of the company for the new power of Fidel Castro in 1959. I stayed in that job until August 18, 1960, when I could get my wife and our two daughters out to the United States, not to be exposed to greater dangers in Cuba. Shortly after, having had an ideological confrontation with former classmates who were participating in the new government, left Cuba by sea in a ferry from Havana to Key West as I have decided to officially resign to work for a government that was beginning to show its anti-democratic tendencies to totalitarianism and absolute repression of the most fundamental rights and freedom of its citizens.
I met with the family in Miami and five days later left for New York City, where my brother Miguel Angel was since 1948.
It is clear that the coming to power of Fidel Castro was traumatic for Cuba. How was life from there in America?
The first two years of exile living in New York were not easy, but after the first month I started working in the city with a market research company. These were years that served to broaden my knowledge of art, studying in some depth in the magnificent libraries and museums, while my daughters learned the language and American customs. Three years later, I was able to rejoin the oil industry and work as a manager in operations in Venezuela and as Managing Director in Central America, not with Shell, but with a associated subsidiary of Gulf Oil Co, based in the city of Cleveland ( Ohio) where we live another three years until 1968. From this year we installed more permanently in the area of New York and my daughters went to higher education.
From there I entered a new stage that I began to spend endless hours at night to make drawings, quite rudimentary at first, with images of the environment I grew up in Havana and maritime territory with its memorable reglano trams, its people and customs, including religious processions and ceremonies of the Afro-Cuban. I started to make a collection of works in oils on canvas for those nostalgic nights remembering the Cuba of those times.
I spent too many hours of the night in the rooms of the hotels I stayed while traveling, one or two weeks a month to Puerto Rico, Mexico and Canada occasionally. Organized and instructed groups of sellers and managers for Duro Test, an interesting company producing long-lasting bulbs that also distributed lighting products of high quality.
It was a productive period of eleven years when my oldest daughter graduated, Maggie, with a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry. She was the first woman graduate as military member of the U.S. Army Reserve in the state of New Jersey, of which I have always felt very proud and happy. After leaving with the rank of lieutenant colonel to marry, giving up an offer to teach in the famous West Point Military Academy. From this dear child I have two grandchildren born during a saddening family separation at the end of 1990. These two grandchildren, Paul and Daniel, are also very good and also very dedicated to their pre-university studies now. Maritza, my dear youngest daughter graduated as a teacher of Spanish and Art. From her I have one grandson and two granddaughters, three in all. The oldest girl, with which, fortunately, I have a wonderful relationship, lives in North Carolina, and has given me two great-grandchildren, Johnny and Mary six years and four, who were visiting us for about a month last October 2011. My two daughters are still living in the metropolitan area near the city of New York, where their dear mother sadly died at the age of 77.
Cuba was far away geographically, but was present in your memory. It is reflecting in your pictures.
That’s right. By the early ’70s had accumulated a considerable number of those memories of Cuba in oil and I attended an invitation to present one of them called «a Fesser.» Contains some of the large warehouses adjacent to the docks that were part of the railway station of the same name in Regla, with a panoramic view, where you could see the shoreline into the bay of Havana, and a part of the road where a girl is walking hand in hand with his father.
The photo of the painting was published in the newspapers and it gave occasion to interviews that suddenly opened doors for the first awards in 1982 and 1983, the Council of the Arts of the State of New Jersey and the Institute of International Education that handles the so called Cintas Fellowship in New York. From these interviews came out awards in television and press as the work began to be exhibited in museums from New York, Washington DC, Chicago, Minnesota, Miami and Tampa, Florida. Also in Connecticut, and other cities and states where some were acquired for the collection of these museums.
What was to combine painting with strictly professional activities?
I did it for over twenty years, until 1996, thanks to since I came to North America, my name as Francisco Javier Elio Beltran and Marrero, to the commercial world became Elio Frank Beltran where I was always just called Frank, while as an artist’s name always listed and known simply as Elio Beltran.
I have a story about when in 1994 I was on American television interview after receiving the award for artist/painter of the year by the works on the sad plight of Cuban rafters who died in the Florida Straits trying to reach freedom. Fourteen works went eventually to the collection of the Museum of Florida International University. FIU en Miami. FIU in Miami. The day after the interview, I was stopped taking me by the arm, by a colleague at the entrance of the offices of Philips Lighting Company in New York, where I worked then as an international regional manager in which I was until 2001. The colleague who worked as a clerk in another department, was very excited telling me that he had seen me briefly the night before on TV, and I said, not stopping to talk, saying, «No!, You have only seen my twin brother «, and I continue my way quickly leaving him by the elevator in the lobby with his mouth open like a mailbox.
It was not until mid 1996 that the senior manager of the corporation, having finally learned a way to my work as an artist, sent his secretary in charge of public relations to my office to see me and make me an interview for the magazine publishing Philips of the Netherlands in Europe, both in English and Spanish for Spanish-speaking countries, my happy ending my cover-up of two intertwined activities that never interfered with each other. For over thirty years served through and through each one independently of each other, working late at night and weekends in my studio, as well as Spain’s place located in Roquetas de Mar in Almeria, Andalusia were I produced and exhibited my Colors of Spain oils.
Precisely the relationship with Spain is very present in your paintings, what led you also to exhibit in different parts of our territory?
Together with the work of memories of Cuba, I have also in the US, been producing works from my collection Colors of Spain which, a large part is devoted to denote the importance of the heritage of Spanish culture in Cuba and the U.S..In this collection there are works made as a tribute to Miguel de Cervantes and to Goya, the Spanish painter who is most admired.
It was that in 2005, at the invitation of the Cultural Office of the Department of Almeria in Roquetas de Mar, it was opened to the public an exhibition at the Museo Castillo de Santa Ana, with 45 works that included themes of Spanish traditions and events related to history of its cultural importance, as the missions founded in California by Father Junipero Serra, and the arrival of Ponce de Leon, St. Augustine, Florida, in search of the Fountain of Youth in 1565.
Part of the exhibits in the name of Cultural Roots were then taken by special invitation to the exhibition at the Zaragoza Fair in October 2007, which highlighted the Viva Goya Oil, done on a large canvas with allegories of eight the works of that great master of Aragon.
All these works have already been moved to the U.S., to be exhibited in St. Augustine and Miami if that is also possible in the coming years. Will be shown during the celebration of the arrival of Ponce de Leon to Florida and the installation of Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles in 1565 as the first governor of St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States, who turns 450 years in 2015. It will be celebrated in style with cultural activities starting from next year until then.
Now what is your level of activity in the U.S.?
A little over a year since Aurora and I moved from Coral Gables in Miami to Ormond Beach, which is located about 50 miles south of St. Augustine, wheresice, I have been able to partner with other local artists and I’m showing new works in the Gallery «Professional Artist of San Agustin – PASTA», the oldest in the city. At the same time I am a member of the Association of Art in San Augustine, where I am quite active in plans to exhibit the works on the roots of our culture and Spanish heritage in which I have been working for more than ten years. I am considered like a pioneer promoter of these celebrations since that many years, and now that I’m casually «in situ», as they say, while still making our trips to Spain each year, where we joined a very important link, both, Aurora, my wife, who was born in Leon, Spain, and was raised in Madrid, both in a nexus that we are very happy to be part of and to be able to make a contribution to art, celebrating the heritage from the top of the cradle of our culture.
Can you tell us any adventure or story that has happened?
Walking through the streets around the basilica in Zaragoza, Spain, I saw a poster announcing a presentation of regional dances of Aragon. I arrived early, so I could sit still. At the start the show, the place was full to bursting. I can say that when they started dancing to their music and songs, which were many, I felt the grace of the choreography and I heard a presenter who said the details of the performance. Soon, I realized how lucky I was to learn just in time on the day of the presentation. As they developed the dances and songs my excitement was increasing to the point that saliéndome were tears in my eyes and ended up getting up from my comfortable chair. It made me want to go out dancing on stage too.
All I can say is it was so unexpected and surprising that I was thinking, and still think, that was like the call of the blood within us body and soul. As if I was part of what was taking place in a very singular way that I have never felt before like that, and I was extremely happy walking out of the place as a child by the hand of his grandfather from Aragon.
Just around the same trip, we went to Toledo, where I also had the joy of it during a holiday in the city because of the Corpus celebrations, balconies of buildings in the city had large tapestries hanging that gave much color to the streets where there was to be a great procession. The streets were full of rosemary everywhere and at night, lanterns light up the streets of a very special way.
The amount of experience in both cities was reflected in this work, entitled Aragon and Toledo.
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I do not know what the dancing and the singing of the jota has in it,
nor the aroma of the rosemary, but deep inside of me I feel as if from there as well I am.
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Coupled with the pre revolutionary process in Cuba, until now, is in a book published in English, called Back to Cuba. The return of the Butterflies (Regreso a Cuba. El Retorno de las Mariposas ), which was released in 2004, the same year that Elio F. Beltran was nominated for artist/painter of the year by the Cambridge Biographical Society in London. In addition, He also on the same year was awarded the silver medal award by the French Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters in Paris. A new special Edition was published in 2010 and can be ordered from Amazon and other book stores and at www.Xlibrix.com.
For more information about Elio F. Beltran, his life, work and his book Back to Cuba, please visit www.eliobeltran.com and www.backtocuba.net
David Bonastre Piazuelo
