Humberto was soft, cultured, observer and, above all, humble (in the straight sense of the word, not in which Castroism disseminated to confuse with material poverty).
Miami, United States. – There are two places in Miami that, as long as they are demolished, represent in their own right to the Cuban painter and cultural promoter Humberto Calzada, who has just died in exile at 81: the first is the Cuban Heritage Collection, from the University of Miami (UM), where an immense mural of the artist receives the visitor, and the second, which may be in front of him Bakery, from 72nd Street (Sunset), in which he had breakfast or snack, alone or with someone, as if he were in Paris.
I lived near the Cuban Heritage Collection and even more about the pink bakery that has few tables, and where to park a vehicle during the evening is a headache. Humberto was that soft, cultured, observer and, above all, humble man (in the straight sense of the word, not in which Castroism disclosed to confuse with material poverty).
There in the Moulin Rose bakery, the employees knew him and in that place legitimized Cuban exile with a lot of lender. He had the gift of emotional balance, or rather, of emotional intelligence, which achieves wonders when the trench of so many years of exile becomes unbearable.
Humberto, an engineer by profession, in his own words, was lucky to exile when he was a teenager, because without exile, he said in October 2012 during the presentation of a documentary about his life, “maybe he would never have been a painter.”
The preview of the documentary In Dreams Awakemade by the actors and producers Anabel Leal and Reinaldo Cruz, took place in the room of her house in the southwest of the Miami-Dade County, where Humberto, following in the footsteps of Domingo del Monte, made some artistic gatherings in which she brought together the oldest exile with which she had just arrived.
I was lucky to attend several. A friend, the sports chronicler Omar Claro, took me, just arrived in Miami from Barcelona with my wife and my two children of birth. There I found a delicious and soft atmosphere like his hosts Humberto and his wife, Carmen.
Over the years I have very much thanked and silently land in Miami with the sweetness of those gatherings. Miami is a hard city because you have to drive everywhere mandatory under a sun of justice, but it is also soft if one finds the promised earth point, and that was given by Humberto.
In the documentary In Dreams AwakeThe creator explains that the Arab revolution or spring (2010-2012) changed the perspective of his work.
“The rebellious people against their dictators, the total rebellion, burning everything, madness as the last salvation. It looks very good on their large canvas entitled Last callin which a Cuban plane escapes, with only two lit windows, from a burning city. ”
This extract of a chronicle that I wrote then in Cubanet It refers to a Humberto that goes beyond what their canvases inspired by colonial architecture, in the vitars and semicircular arches, in the columns of the Cuban portal, in the soils of chess boards such as that of their own study and, ultimately, in that colonial environment of the Caribbean that sometimes mixed with the minimal and white architecture of the Mediterranean.
Carlos Alberto Montaner (1943-2023), relevant political scientist and writer, contemporary with the painter, in the preview he commented on his point of view:
“The most important thing may not be the theme in Humberto’s work, but the execution,” he said. “Without the execution, that is, the mental process of the creator and its good invoice in front of the canvas or cardboard, we would not be feeding these gatherings,” he settled.
For his part, Carmen was from the family that, as far as she knew, was owned by plots again, on Kohly Avenue. That was my neighborhood. She was so attentive to people that I did not want to tell her that perhaps my ancestors bought land from her family to build three houses, that with time and exile we lost.
It had been a long time and there were urgencies such as welcoming those who continued to arrive in Miami.
According to the Cernuda Arte gallery website, which has several works by Humberto, it is “one of the most prolific and emblematic artists of Cuban historical exile.”
Humberto Calzada was born in Havana in 1944 and moved to Miami in 1960, where he studied at the University of Miami and graduated in Industrial Engineering (1966) with a master’s degree in Business Administration (MBA) in Finance (1968).
But in 1976 “he abandoned engineering to devote himself completely to art,” he adds.
The last time I saw Humberto was at Moulin Rose Bakery.
He asked me how I had gone and told him my professional career in Miami until it became a correspondent for the EFE news agency, the first Spanish in the world.
He invited me that same day to a Yoani Sánchez conference at the UM and took me in an old van.
When years later, in 2023, Efe commissioned me a report at the Cuban Heritage Collection, I found his colonial architecture mural presiding over the research center and threw time back.
Gladys Gómez, one of the five founders of the Cuban Heritage Collection and who arrived in this country in the 60s with Operation Pedro Pan, told me that Humberto was very sick. I wrote several text messages but did not answer me.
It seemed to me that this mural in the prelude to the largest Cuban heritage collection of its theme outside the island, with more than 75,000 books and newspapers among many other documents and objects, and that it will turn 100 in 2026, it says it all in a clear, calm and soft way. As he was.
