/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/ HISTORY-CUBA: Picasso’s Unknown Family in the Caribbean

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, May 30 2000 (IPS) - Pablo Picasso died in 1973 never having visited Cuba and without ever knowing that his grandfather had left him with relatives on the island – Afro-Cubans and mestizos – who were also unaware they were related to the great Spanish painter.

Picasso is said to have commented at one time, “a grandfather of mine ended up in Cuba.” Beyond that mention, however, for an entire century, nothing was known for sure about Francisco Picasso Guardeño, the grandfather who, like so many Spaniards of his era, emigrated to the Americas in 1968 in search of his fortune and never returned to his home country.

Meanwhile, on the island, it may have occurred to the Cuban Picassos that there was some family tie to the creator of ‘Guernica,’ but the mere colour of their skin led them to rule out such speculation.

Juan Antonio Pascual Picasso Pérez, grandson of Francisco’s first- born in Cuba, says with a good bit of humour, “Picasso in black and white,” as he contemplates his photo published alongside another of his “famous uncle” in a Cuban newspaper.

“We had heard about the painter, but really neither my father or I had any interest in checking into the family ties my grandfather left behind in Spain when he came to Cuba,” he told IPS.

At age 71, Juan Antonio still provides technical assessment as a plasterer, he loves jazz and dancing, believes that music keeps him alive and is proud of his grandchildren. One of them, Joan Picasso, 11, is studying painting at an art school. 888

The truth about the Picasso family ties came out late last year when Cuban historian and photographer Barbara Mejides announced she had found a family in Havana she believed was the only one with that last name in Cuba.

We now know “there may be another family, white, but we have not been able to find them,” Mejides told IPS.

The discovery of other relatives would prompt new questions, but would not cloud what shines as a passionate love story between the Spanish immigrant and Cristina Serra, a free black woman during a time when slavery still existed on the island.

Mejides her research in 1998 at the request of the Pablo Picasso Association of La Coruña, a province of the autonomous community of Galicia in Spain, in order to complete its biographical files about the painter.

“The search began at the centre of the island and ended in Havana, just metres from my house. When I saw Juan Antonio, I had no doubt. The likeness is incredible: the same eyes, the same nose, the same face,” says Mejides.

According to the researcher, the immigrant Francisco found work at a sugar mill in the middle of the island. Once he had started his family, they settled in Sagua la Grande, a town 350 km from Havana that now has more than 60,000 residents.

It is still not known what role he played or what his attitude was toward the first war of independence against his homeland, Spain, which began the year he arrived, 1868, and lasted a decade.

“It was common in Cuba to find a Spaniard living with a black woman,” said Mejides. “The completely unusual part of this case is that Francisco founded a family with Cristina and gave his surname to the four children they had together.”

Most of the time, their father was working at the sugar mill, so the children grew up very close to their mother, who is believed to have had some level of formal education because she was able to instruct her own children.

“All of them knew how to read and write, the two brothers had a professional trade and the two sisters were well educated for their era. They were Catholic and in their training there was a great mix of Spanish and African culture,” said the researcher.

Picasso’s grandfather died of anaemia in 1888 when he was 63 years old and had been in Cuba 20 years.

Of Francisco’s four children, both Juan Francisco Aurelio and Arcadia de la Caridad had families. The son had children with an Afro-Cuban woman, while the daughter, like her mother, married a Spaniard.

Apparently, his children never learned of Francisco’s family in Spain, but in their names, without their knowledge, the father reproduced his loved ones he had left behind in his native land.

This detail now serves as proof in Mejides’s investigations. “Aurelia was a daughter of Francisco (in Spain) who died very young. When Picasso’s grandfather has his first son in Cuba, he makes his third name Aurelio,” she explained.

Juan Francisco Aurelio had nine children, belonged to a Masonic sect and was known as “rumbero mayor,” a title given to the great dancers of the rumba, an Afro-Cuban rhythm closely linked to the traditions brought to the Caribbean from Africa.

His eldest son, Juan Remigio, was founder of the Cultural Association of Plaster Workers in Havana and member of the first Communist Party that existed in Cuba.

In the 1920s, when we came to live in Havana, my father “broke all colour barriers. It was a major event to see a black plasterer in Havana, because that job normally belonged to Italians and Moroccans,” remembers Juan Antonio Pascual.

Heir to his father’s trade, Juan Antonio says he is “very pleased” with the news, but, he adds, “so far there has been no indication that the Picassos of Spain want to meet us.”

In the early 1960s, Pablo Picasso was to go to Cuba to install his sculpture, the Dove of Peace, at the site where, until the Cuban Revolution of 1959, an eagle monument symbolising the United States had stood. But he never made the journey.

Biographers suppose that during his encounters in Paris with Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, Picasso might have heard about some mulatta women with the Picasso name who Lam had met in Sagua la Grande.

In her research so far, Mejides has recorded several successive generations of the Cuban Picassos. The family begun by Francisco on the island currently has 31 living members.

For Mejides, beyond the excitement of discovering the family ties of one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, the Picasso story is “representative and typical of Cuba, its idiosyncrasies and its origins as a nation.”

The researcher is now trying to uncover more information about Cristina Serra – a black woman who was never a slave, according to her descendants – and is preparing a documentary about the Cuban family of Pablo Picasso together with producer Raisa White.