In Havana’s Republican-era neighbourhood of Vedado, salty air, hurricane rain, tree roots and the years have gnawed at the façades. Here, the artist Nerea Vera is renovating a house. It’s good to see neoclassical bones and art nouveau floors being buffed up.
Open to visitors by appointment, Vera’s house is becoming an informal museum of accidental sorts. It tells the story of the Republic of Cuba in microcosm – that stretch from 1902, when Cuba grew into itself as an independent country, following the end of wars with Spain and post-US military occupation. With her skills as an engraver, sculptor, illustrator and painter, Vera has restored the building’s mouldings and frescoes.
Objects left by the house’s previous owners – a Baccarat lamp, a 1930 Victrola gramophone, a 19th-century chess table – mingle with her own work, which includes an intricate drawing of Che Guevara’s corpse depicted as a martyr, and a series of relic-like blown-glass hearts kept in a suitcase . The house’s original owner, Juan Cruz Bustillo, was a freemason and mambí (a veteran of the wars of independence). He acquired the land in 1902 with war compensation before joining the new Republican army.
After the 1959 revolution, the state expropriated the ground floor. Over the years – as with many other once-bourgeois families – Cruz Bustillo’s became impoverished, ultimately selling their home to Vera. She is also resurrecting the defunct cultural magazine Social , reprinting p.