Last month a member of Governor George Ryan’s delegation in Cuba complained that he’d been bitten on the arm by a prostitute with whom he had struck up a friendly conversation. The Sun-Times reported that he ended up paying the woman $10 to go away.
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Pulido, who’s 57, says he’s seen an alarming reliance on prostitution before: as a young boy in the days prior to the revolution of 1959, he watched U.S. marines cavort with local women. He claims the revolution did away with all that, until pressure from the U.S. embargo and the fall of communism in Russia and eastern Europe combined to send the country into a spiraling economic crisis.
Pulido is luckier than most. As a young boy who showed signs of artistic talent, he was strongly encouraged by his parents and their friends to study art. At 16 he enrolled in Havana’s San Alejandro School of Visual Arts. Today he teaches at his former school and is a designer and graphic artist as well as a sculptor, earning about $40 a month plus whatever his commissions bring in. Pulido also receives special treatment from Cuba’s cultural ministry, which hopes to bolster tourism to the island by promoting its artists abroad. Since the government considers art to be educational material, it allows Pulido to travel and sell his work. Several of his large pieces are in collections in Italy, Australia, and the United States.
