Lili Bernard and Her Celia Cruz Painting
Lili Bernard Multi-Media Fine Artist
Celebrating Father God, Mother Nature and the Human Race
BACK HOME
ARTWORK
CONTACT
Previous
Next
Cuban Valley

"Cuban Valley"

Oil on Canvas 24 " x 18 "

© 2007 Lili Bernard

Original & Gliceé Prints Available for Purchase

I'll never be able to capture in a painting the bountifulness of the Cuban landscape.  My friend Maria Elena Gil and I were chatting about the splendor of Cuba's terrain.  Elena and I were both born in post revolutionary Cuba within a year of one another, she in Havana and I in Santiago de Cuba.  We were both toddlers when we left Cuba for the United States with our parents and siblings.  We were both adults when we returned to Cuba for the first time.

Maria and I spoke about the excitement of watching the island appear through the plane window.  Our feelings upon coming home to an island which we could recall only through sensory memory were immense.

 

"It's real!" were Maria's thoughts upon seeing the island from the plane.  "It's not some fantasy!"  There's so much talk about Cuba, amongst us Cuban exiles. For we who left too young to remember sights, the talk fills our minds with imaginings that get mixed into the realty of what our sense of smell remembers.

Though we returned to Cuba in different years, both Maria and I touched down onto our birth island under dramatic weather conditions.  Maria's plane landed in Havana in an intense lightning and thunder storm.  My plane landed in Santiago in the midst of Hurricane Lili.

Outside our plane window, through the clouds and rain, we gazed in awe at the magnificent green of Cuba's tropical vegetation, bending in the wet wind, against the most radiant red soil.  My parents say that Cuba is fourth in the world for high iron content in soil.

A fullness in spirit accompanied the feast for our eyes.  We felt our hearts explode with the intensity which cries from the earth of Cuba, from it's people and its history.

Back to Artwork