FROMMER'S FOR FREELOADERS

For a very brief period in the late 1960's my uncle, the great Cuban artist Micah Carpentier, was an official cultural emissary of the Castro regime. As part of his mandate, Carpentier traveled to what was then referred to as 'third-world countries' and extolled the virtues of socialist aesthetics.

Micah Carpentier in Pyongyang, North Korea, 1968

From Luanda to Tirana Carpentier spread the gospel of utility and pedagogy while mocking the Western bourgeois ideals of beauty and form. That his own work at the time was perfectly at home within the European avant-garde was of little consequence since the one thing Communism had in common with the art world was that intellectual consistency was totally optional.

The Song of Degrees,(detail), Micah Carpentier, 1968

The way my uncle saw things, he was given a rare opportunity to travel and although most of the places he visited were rather bleak at least he was able to extend his diet beyond frijoles negros and fried plantains.

Things came to a head in the spring of 1970 when the small French periodical Texte Obscur included Carpentier among the world's 100 most influential contemporary artists. (He came in at 77, right after Barnett Newman and just before Currado Malaspina). This quickly disqualified him from any future diplomatic postings.

The remaining three years of his life were a living hell. Under constant governmental surveillance and suffering from chronic gastrointestinal discomfort, Carpentier fell into a bottomless morass of melancholic listlessness.  

He longed for the casinos of Cairo, the racetracks of Tallin, the whores of Hanoi and the poets of Pyongyang. He missed the perfumed aroma of sweet Cantonese hairy gourd, the exotic spices of Yemeni mutton fahsa and the flaming fir tree moonshine of northern Estonia.

He had become the consummate communist flâneur, a non-aligned bon-vivant who was just as at home among the smokestacks of Yakutsk as he was on the breadlines of Bulgaria and Benin.

I still carry around his dogeared copy of Moldova on 5 Rubles a Day with all his notes and markings. On a fold-out street map of Chișinău he wrote the following jewel of timeless wisdom:

"Better to live like a cockroach in Bessarabia than like a shah in an East-Prussian Schönberg shithole dreaming of rum, rhumba and summer nights in La Palma."