Lam in his studio in the 1960s

The door to Lou Laurin Lam's Paris apartment, on a quiet street near the Bastille, is armor-plated—but not because the place is packed with treasures. It's not thieves the widow of the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam needs protection from, but art dealers and collectors. As the author of the highly regarded catalogue raisonné of her late husband's works and sole uncontested judge of their authenticity, Lou Lam has the power to make people very angry. A few years ago, a dealer was so enraged by her negative judgment on a painting that he assaulted her. (Luckily a family friend was there to throw him out.) Since that day, she does not admit anyone to the apartment when she is alone. "We make them leave the picture for at least a day," says her son Esquiledo, a 37-year-old pilot with an art-history degree who now spends most of his time helping his mother protect Lam's heritage from a plague of forgeries. "And we communicate the answer by letter, so the reaction can happen somewhere else."

Much against her will, Lou Lam has found herself at the center of a crisis in a major new sector of the art market, as a boom in Cuban art has generated an explosion of fakes. The boom began with the market's rediscovery of Lam in 1979, three years after a stroke had left him partially paralyzed. (He died in 1982 at the age of 80.) In fall 1979 Sotheby's sold a 1943 oil for $104,500—a breakthrough that turned into a trend in 1984, when no fewer than 58 Lams were sold by Christie's and Sotheby's, with the top price climbing from $198,000 to $214,000 between the spring and fall sales. The escalation hasn't stopped. Last May a 1943 oil, La mañana verde (Green Morning), sold at Sotheby's for $1,267,500, about 12 times the price of a comparable work two decades ago.

Simultaneously, Lam's oeuvre became a template for forgery on a vast scale. Since 1992 alone, Lou Lam has approved a total of 310 authentic works, and turned thumbs down on approximately twice as many fakes—"an average of 100 per year," says Esquiledo. The appearance in 1996 of the first volume of her catalogue raisonné (published by Acatos, in Lausanne), covering about 1,000 works from the period 1923 to 1960 has slowed the traffic (since January the Lams have seen only a dozen new fakes) without stopping it. Last year, for example, Christie's was offered what Fernando Gutierrez, vice-president and head of the Latin American department, calls "an extremely well done" fake Lam, a work on paper that purported to come from a series of studies for Lam's 1943 masterpiece, The Jungle. Had it been genuine, says Gutierrez, the piece would have been worth $200,000.

What happened first to Lam is now happening on a massive scale to his Cuban contemporaries and successors. An ARTnews investigation in the United States, France, and Cuba reveals that not just Lam but Cuban art as a whole is being corrupted and undermined by forgery on a massive scale. There are "thousands of fakes," charges the Miami-based publisher Ramón Cernuda, a leading collector of Cuban art. He says he has been offered "in excess of 500 forgeries" since he began collecting at the end of the 1970s. Miami gallery owner Gary Nader, a leader in the field and publisher of The Latin-American Art Price Guide, asserts that he has seen "millions of dollars in fakes" in private homes and galleries. In his opinion, "95 percent of Cuban paintings on the market are fakes."

In 1993 Lou Lam wrote on the back of a photo of the painting below: "l'oeuvre...n'est pas de le main de" (is not from the hand of) Wifredo Lam. A Florida dealer changed her certificate to read: "l'oeuvre...est bien de" (is certainly from) Lam's hand. But a second dealer, to whom the picture was offered, got suspicious and sent the certificate back to Lou.

Juan Martínez, associate professor of art history at Florida International University in Miami and author of Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters, says that in the past three years about 40 percent of the pictures he has been asked to authenticate were fakes. Likewise, Marta Gutierrez—a dealer who serves as Sotheby's associate and representative for Puerto Rico, and who bought pictures directly from Wifredo Lam—thinks that 50 percent of the Cuban paintings people brought to her gallery in the mid-1990s were fakes. Her son Fernando, of Christie's, who worked in her gallery from 1982 to 1996, puts the figure at 70 percent or more.

The vendors are not all innocent. The Lams believe that of the hundred-odd people who personally brought them works to examine during that period--about half, they say, were collectors, with the rest divided between go-betweens (or "runners") and galleries--two out of five were not acting in good faith. Those numbers suggest that the traffic in forged Cuban works is now the domain of organized networks, operating on an international scale. There are "networks of dealers," Esquiledo says, "who present [fake] pictures first in the U.S., then in Europe. If they're Spanish-speaking, they'll start with Miami then Mexico, then Spain, and finally Paris."

Lou Laurin Lam has the right to separate true from false.

The Lams almost certainly never encounter the more savvy forgers, because French law (unlike American and Cuban law) gives them, as Lam’s heirs, a droit morale, or "moral right," over Lam's work. This means that they alone decide officially what is authentic and what is fake. If they believe a work is fake, they can file a complaint that will result in its confiscation and destruction if it is on French soil. They have done just that in 80 cases involving 130 pictures, by Esquiledo's count. But that power to seize and destroy a fake also gives pause to a collector who suspects he has one. As Gary Nader points out, "How do you get your money back if you have no evidence?"

The Lams reply that seizing fakes is the only sure way to get them out of circulation. This spring a photograph of a forgery the family first saw in 1996 was sent to them by an Italian who claimed it had belonged to his father, who was missing from the previous provenance. "We've been shown the same picture twice in two weeks," recounts Esquiledo, "with two different grandfathers in the provenance."

The first sign of the coming flood of fake Lams appeared in 1980, when a gallery near Ghent, Belgium, put on an exhibition of 53 pictures by Wifredo Lam and 67 other works by various modern masters, which were all fakes. Also on display was a fake telegram from Lou Lam stating her regret at missing the opening. (The forger later went to prison.)

Prior to that, Lou had seen occasional fakes of her husband's works from his Italian period in the 1960s and '70s--"some drawings, some pastels, a few paintings," she recalled during a series of conversations in her Paris home. Her own large ceramic works and mixed-media canvases fill the apartment, alongside Lam's collection of African and Pacific Island wood masks and sculptures, and a wrought-iron door from their former home in Italy that he decorated with sheet-metal cutouts of horned gods. Born in Stockholm in 1934, Lou Laurin met Lam at a Paris gallery opening in 1955 and married him in 1960.

Lou Lam likes a good joke, and that was how she regarded those early fakes. "They were pretty gross," she says--nothing that could fool a serious dealer or collector--and she even considered them normal. After all, she points out, "there have been fakes in Italy since the Middle Ages."

But more than a dubious Latin tradition was involved here. Historical and social forces were about to turn Lam into the breakthrough figure for the market in modernist and contemporary Cuban art. The sense of impending changes in a closed society, coupled with access to new or rediscovered genres of art, excited collectors--and speculators--as the 1980s came to an end. That excitement has since been sustained by what Juan Martínez calls "the myth of the last Communist bastion," which adds cachet to artists touched by Castro's revolution. And there is the added element of rarity. From the beginning of the boom in Cuban art, Martínez notes, "there was a vacuum in the market--lots of demand and no supply, because the art was in the Cuban museums, locked up."

Lam fit the role of the first Latin American "crossover" artist in part because he had lived and worked in many countries. Of Afro-Cuban descent, he assimilated European modernism without sacrificing his own heritage. Born in 1902, he set sail for Europe in 1923, after finishing his education in working class public schools, on a scholarship reserved for "a young person of color in need." His first wife and infant son died of tuberculosis in 1931 as he was struggling to launch his painting career in Madrid, and rage at poverty helped draw him to the Left. He fought on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War, was wounded, and followed the Republican exodus in 1938 to Paris, where he became a friend of Picasso ("Love at first sight," Lam later recalled) and the Surrealists. The following year, Picasso found Lam a Paris dealer, Pierre Loeb--who, when Picasso brought him to Lam's studio for the first time, remarked that Lam "is influenced by the Negroes." To which Picasso replied furiously, "He's got the right, he is a Negro!"

Picasso realized that Lam was no primitive; on the contrary, he represented the fusion of Cuba's naive tradition with European esthetics. He was the perfect reply to the Cubists' fascination with African art. It was after his return to Cuba in 1941--he had fled occupied France--that he fully achieved a synthesis of Cubist technique, Surrealist sensibility, and animistic, voodoo-influenced subject matter. In his best-known work, The Jungle, deities that look like composites of animals, plants, and humans, skulls rolling at their feet, seem to march out of a nightmare into the space around the viewer.

In the early 1940s, he began to exhibit at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. At the war's end, he resumed traveling again--to Haiti, France, Italy, Venezuela, and New York. By the 1950s another of his trademark images, the femme-cheval-- half woman, half horse--had become a central motif. He abandoned his Cuban residence on April 8, 1958, the day before the general strike that heralded Castro's 1959 victory, leaving behind what Esquiledo Lam estimates at 75 to 80 important works--the family has never received an exact accounting from the Cubans--and an unknown number of drawings. Before leaving, Lam hurriedly burned many pieces that he considered worthless, but he didn't have time to destroy them all. Other works may have been looted by burglars and soldiers from both sides; Lam's home was near a military base--an area that all but violent gangs had fled as the end approached. Esquiledo remembers his father later accepting the nationalization of his paintings, saying "It's good for the people; they can see my work."

Despite generally friendly relations with the revolutionaries--Lam declined Castro's invitation to become minister of culture in 1962 on the grounds that he was an artist, not a politician, recalls Esquiledo--he moved back to Europe, and eventually settled in Albisola, Italy. But he remained a patriot. When the Cuban government offered a blatantly propagandistic collective painting to the Salon of May in Paris in 1967, the center of the wheel-shaped piece was by Lam.

From the start, judging by the family's files, fakes circulated most rapidly in the countries where Lam had lived and worked, such as Spain, Italy, and France, as well as in the Cuban exile community in South Florida. Last year a sale of Cuban art at the Ansorena auction house in Madrid fell flat after word spread among collectors that there were problems with the pieces on sale. Today the traffic is no longer confined to those markets. One forgery the Lams first identified in 1992 (bundled in a Swedish collection of 23 pictures, all fakes) later turned up in Florida, and was offered to a gallery in Germany last spring.

The fact that Lam traveled and worked in so many places affords multiple opportunities for forgers seeking to establish an authentic looking provenance. A case in point was reported by Pierre Loeb's son Albert, who knew Lam as a child in Cuba, where his family joined the artist after fleeing Nazi-occupied France. He recalls that a few years ago, an employee in his Paris gallery was approached by a man who wanted him to steal exhibition stickers that could be applied to the backs of fake Lams.

Daniel Lelong, whose first Lams were purchased from the estate of Pierre Matisse and whose Paris gallery has held an exclusive tract on the sale of works belonging to the Lam family since 1988, says, "It has happened that people--dealers, collectors, runners--show up here, saying, 'I've got things by Lam,' and ask for certificates. Maybe 50 percent of them are acting in good faith." He provides a certificate, he says, only when "I have previously sold the work, never for things that I haven't sold." In the current market a Lam without a certificate from Lou Lam is immediately suspect--a tribute to the respect accorded her catalogue raisonné. She charges 1,400 French francs, about $250, for an initial consultation and a fee if the work is authentic, ranging from $300 for a drawing or pastel to $10,000 for a major painting.

There are such large quantities of Cuban fakes, and so many of them are skillfully done, that even experts have been burned. Cernuda, who is considered a mentor by many other collectors, bought a fake Tomás Sánchez from Lumbreras Arts, Inc., of Miami for $16,000 in 1992. (The Eleventh Circuit Court of Dade County awarded him the price of the picture plus interest in 1995.) In September Cernuda and fellow collector Francisco García picketed the Alfredo Martínez gallery in Miami, wearing paintings by Cuban artists García had purchased at the gallery that he subsequently decided were fakes. A person answering the phone at the gallery said Martínez was traveling and could not be reached.

Sánchez, born in 1928, symbolizes both the current generation of Cuban painters and the rapidity with which forgers have seized on their works. He emerged as the leader of the Volumen Uno group after winning the Joan Miró Prize in Barcelona in 1980. Granted political asylum by the United States in 1993, he currently divides his time between Miami and Costa Rica.

In the past six months, Miami dealer Jorge Sorí, who worked with Sánchez on an exclusive contract from 1993 to 1996, sold two of his medium-size pictures for a total of $180,000, and another Sánchez set a record price for the artist of $310,500 at Christie's last May. As his prices have risen, so has the volume of fakes: "In the past five years," says Sorí, "I've seen 300 fakes of this artist." Sorí has also seen fakes of works by Lam and Amelia Peláez, the modernist painter and ceramist who died in Havana in 1968.

One of the more spectacular public incidents to date in this traffic occurred last November, when Christie's withdrew from its fall sale six important Cuban works estimated at a total of $500,000. One of the forged artists was Mario Carreño, who was born in 1913 and fled the revolution in 1959 for Chile, where he still lives. Another was René Portocarrero, who died in Havana in 1985 at the age of 73. Mariano Rodríguez (1912-90) and Estéban Chartrand (1825-89), about whom Cernuda is writing a biography, completed the group.

The decision to withdraw the pictures was based in part on Christie's suspicion that someone in the Cuban government has been helping forgers. One of the withdrawn pictures "was accepted for sale on the basis of a certificate from an expert in Cuba--and the certificate was fake," says Fernando Gutierrez. "The expert confirmed it, and also that the picture was fake." The picture was supposed to be a Portocarrero, according to Cernuda, and the expert who had allegedly signed the certificate was Ramón Vázquez, head of the department of Cuban painting at the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, whom Juan Martínez considers the leading expert on Cuban modernists of the 1930s and 1940s. Instead, Cernuda believes, the certificate probably came from a stock of "at least 100" documents stolen from the Cuban National Museums by someone within the bureaucracy, which were then sold to forgers. Most of the high-ranking Cuban cultural officials ARTnews contacted by phone and fax declined requests to comment.

This is not the first time that what are believed to be stolen Cuban government certificates bearing forged signatures have appeared on the market. One recently came into the hands of Juan Martínez. The certificate accompanied a picture that Martínez was asked to examine, and it was supposedly signed by Ramón Vazquez. The trouble was, the signature of Vazquez, and that wasn't his signature. I called Vazquez"—whom Martínez had previously met during the Cuban expert's two visits to Miami—"and he said it wasn't his signature." Soon afterward, Martínez returned to Cuba for a visit (he was born on the island and left as a child in 1966) and was told by "a contact in the government's cultural bureaucracy" that "someone in the national museums" had acquired blank certificates and sold them. "They were used and signed by different individuals. Depending on what was faked, they would use the 'signature' of the right specialist."

Several fakes in the Lams' files are accompanied by apparently authentic certificates, bearing forged signatures, from Cuban government agencies. On one such certificate, purporting to be from the Fondo de Bienes Culturales and dated May 1990, the signatures of the buyer and the approving official appear to be written in the same hand. There is another danger sign: the certificate spells Lam's name as "Wifredo Oscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla," which is not how it was recorded at his birth in Havana in 1902. It wasn't until 1923 that a Spanish functionary carelessly dropped the "l" from "Wilfredo" on an immigration form, a mistake the artist joyfully adopted in his signature. Warns Juan Martínez, "If you have a certificate from the Cuban National Museums, you're recommended to fax it to them to see if it's real." Christie's has reached the same conclusion, says Fernando Gutierrez: "At this point, we confirm the authenticity of each certificate, too. If they can fake a painting, they can fake a certificate."

A Carreño that was withdrawn from Christie's November sale last year raises an equally troubling issue: that fake paintings may be accompanied by real certificates--in this case, a certificate signed by the artist's wife, Ida Gonzales de Carreño. (The artist is unable to move or speak as the result of a stroke.) Laboratory tests showed that the pigment contained traces of titanium white, a substance for which "the likelihood of the artist using it at the time was not high," says Gutierrez. "It was withdrawn for that reason, basically," he says, adding that he "won't rule out the possibility that the picture is good."

The "Carreño" above was withdrawn from Christie's sale last November, although it was accompanied by a certificate from the artist's wife. Carreño's Patio Colonial Cubano (below) sold for $442,500 at Christie's last May.

Gutierrez remains convinced that Gonzales "is a person of integrity—if she made a mistake, it wasn't with fraudulent intent." Asked to respond, Gonzales replied, "I won't answer that—it strikes me as a bad joke." "Nonetheless," says Isabella Hutchinson, director of Sotheby's Latin American department, "we've never accepted a painting solely because of her certificate."

Dealers worry that the omnipresence of fakes is frightening buyers away from the market for Cuban art. In the past year, says Miami dealer Nader, "I've lost at least 10 or 15 young collectors, because they don't know what to do." Cernuda fears that "Carreño prices are taking a major dip because of the massive forgeries." Three out of the eight Carreños in Sotheby's May sale went unsold, including a Still Life estimated at $40,000 to $60,000, highest among the eight.

Forgers have drawn a major advantage from the fact that as the legitimate market for Cuban art has widened, its collector base has changed radically. Mary-Anne Martin, who runs a New York gallery specializing in Latin American art, watched that change during her years at Sotheby's, where she founded the department of Latin American art in 1979. In those days, she recalls, "almost everyone bought according to national background--Mexicans bought Mexican artists, Brazilians bought Brazilians, a few Venezuelans crossed over." Now, she says, "the market has widened to include Americans, resettled Latins, Europeans, and Japanese." These new buyers are less knowledgeable. "They're not specialists anymore."

Cuban exiles remain the forgers' prime target, because of their growing wealth and because, as Miami developer and collector Francisco García, who emigrated in 1960, puts it, "most people like myself buy for nostalgia, on emotion. We are not very knowledgeable."

Because the exile community is relatively small and closeknit, until very recently its members were reluctant to denounce untrustworthy dealers. "You're going to see them later on the street," says one dealer. Some of them sport the kind of monikers adopted by the underworld, like a Miami runner familiarly known as El Porco, the pig. Others, like Sergio Vismara of the Paper Moon Gallery in Bay Harbor Islands, were more respectable. In 1994 Vismara obtained a certificate of inauthenticity from Lou Lam for a canvas, then changed a few words, turning it into a certificate of authenticity. At the end of the year, Vismara offered the fake and the doctored certificate to Gary Nader's annual auction of Latin American art, a major event in the field. The picture, Nader recalls, was "a well-done fake. I had doubts, so I sent the certificate to Madame Lam. She said, 'They changed it.'" Nader adds, "I've seen this happen four or five times." He did not take action beyond refusing Vismara's fake, he says, for fear of legal reprisals. Vismara subsequently sold it for $50,000, plus two other pictures worth $25,000 each, to a local collector. Miami Beach police records show that the following year Vismara was arrested for the deal and charged with three counts of grand theft in the first degree. Eventually he made restitution, and the case didn't go to trial.

Another major problem is the relative dearth of scholarship in the area. "Lam is the only Latin American artist with a decent catalogue raisonné," says Mary-Anne Martin. In his case, the source material was readily available. From 1960 on, he systematically documented his output in photographs, and even in the decades when he was moving from place to place, he kept notes on his works in progress. Moreover, says Lowery Stokes Sims, curator of 20th-century art at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and author of a doctoral thesis and several influential articles on Lam, "he had himself photographed extensively in the 1940s with his works. There are pictures in the studio with every single painting he had at the time."

Sims's choice of Lam as a subject is itself a comment on past scholarly neglect. An African American, she recalls that "I was told in school that no people of color ever made significant art"—a notion she has sought to debunk. Despite scholars like Sims, Juan Martínez, and a handful of others, there remains a large hole in the scholarly literature where Latin American art ought to be. And that hole, as Martínez points out, is a mine for forgers, because it renders attempts to authenticate Cuban works far more difficult. The majority of dealers in Cuban art, he remarks, "haven't been to Cuba, they haven't handled the paintings, they haven't been to big exhibitions--so where are the experts? Where do you get informed?"

Asked to name the experts on whom Christie's relies, Fernando Gutierrez replies, "We're the experts," but he also concedes that Martínez is right: "What leads to this insecurity is the lack of archival material." Others name Mary-Anne Martin and the Spanish scholar Maria Lluisa Borras, an expert on Lam's work of the 1930s. Sotheby's relies mainly on provenances and "gut instinct," says Hutchinson. "We try to stay as neutral as possible--we really just try to sort out the story. We sometimes ask our restorers, 'Does this look like new paint?' If we have a doubt, we don't put it in the sale."

There are experts with ample documentation at their disposal within the island's cultural bureaucracy--but the U.S. embargo and difficulties in dealing with Cuba make it hard to consult them. "If an expert leaves Havana [to go elsewhere in Cuba], it's virtually impossible to reach him," sighs Fernando Gutierrez. "No overnight delivery. Ordinary mail, forget it. Communication becomes complicated and difficult, and this business is predicated on good communication for all parties."

What has the Cuban government, the greatest repository of the island's artistic patrimony, done to stop the traffic in fakes? The answer is: not much, beyond acknowledging for the first time in response to questions from ARTnews that the traffic exists. In 1992 high-ranking cultural officials created the Foundation of the Friends of Wifredo Lam, one of whose declared purposes was "to reply to any international campaign of defamation" and, in particular, the notion that fake Lams "are made on the island." But when he was asked by ARTnews in a fax to Havana if fakes were coming out of Cuba, the respected expert Alejandro Alonso, former vice-president of the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana and founder and director of the National Museum of Cuban Ceramics, answered, "Of course. I can't tell you where or how they are being made. I can only say that I have seen them." One of the places he has seen them, he added, was the government owned Acacias gallery in Havana, which sells Cuban art for hard currency.

Visitors to the island report that the traffic in fakes is quite open. They are sometimes good enough to impress a scholar like the Met's Lowery Sims, who says the fakes in the Lams' files give her "a sense of people who are highly skilled." Tomás Sánchez, the Cuban exile artist, explains that "there are good painters in Cuba in a very difficult economic situation, who in other circumstances wouldn't forge works. In these circumstances, they do it to survive." And in some cases they have banded together. Cernuda speaks of the "Santa Fe School" of counterfeiters, named for the Havana neighborhood where they operate, who specialize in Peláez and Carreño. If their fame has reached him in Miami, he says, it must have reached Cuban authorities: "In a country like Cuba, a closed society, you can't get away with a school of forgers without someone in authority looking the other way."

That is indeed where the authorities are looking, concedes Alex Rosenberg, a New York dealer and visiting professor at the Higher Institute of Arts in Havana, who has enjoyed chatting with Castro in another of his roles, as a trustee of the island's Ludwig Foundation for the Arts, established by the late German chocolate magnate and art patron Peter Ludwig. "As long as nothing's going out that's important to the nation, the Cuban authorities don't care," Rosenberg says.

Through the early 1990s, the Lams say, the provenance attached to nearly all the fakes they saw was Cuban—"an invariable source in the declarations of the owners" who sought Lou Lam's expertise, as she wrote to then minister of culture Armando Hart in 1990. She raised the issue again with Cuban authorities in 1991 during her last visit to the island, and was told, says Esquiledo, that the government would "take care of it." But a subsequent letter to the Cubans asking for a definitive list of the Lams held in the National Museums received no reply. In 1992 Lou Lam sought aid by founding the Association of the Friends of Wifredo Lam (a similar name was subsequently adopted by the Cuban foundation), which included France's then minister of foreign affairs, Roland Dumas (who is now being investigated for accepting bribes from the ELF petroleum company; he denies all charges). The president of the Cuban group, a high-ranking official in the cultural bureaucracy named Alfredo Guevara, who had known Lam in the 1950s, met with the Lams and Dumas in 1992 and, according to Esquiledo, "denied that there were fakes in Cuba. He demanded proof. We showed him the proofs; we didn't give them to him. He said he'd look into it, and we've heard nothing since."

Dumas tried again in February 1993, writing to the Cuban ambassador in France that "a large share" of the fake Lams in circulation "had undeniably left Cuba with the approval of certain customs and cultural authorities." But a month later, the Socialist government in which Dumas served was routed at the polls, ending hopes of official action on the French side.

Whoever those corrupt officials were, according to Alex Rosenberg, they were not curators in the national museums. "There are people who would do that, but not the museum people we're talking about," he says. Alejandro Alonso asserts of his museum colleagues: "We are striving to promote what is real and authentic, not what is fake."

However, there may be fewer scruples, or less expertise, at lower levels of the bureaucracy. Pilar Fernández Prieto, director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, in response to a fax from ARTnews, admitted that "numerous forged authentication certificates are made" as a result of "attempts to deceive the experts and to create confusion or doubt surrounding a particular piece." Tomás Sánchez says flatly, "There are fakes of my works certified by specialists in Cuba. I'm sure they know the work isn't mine." (The simple fact that a Sánchez was authenticated by a Cuban specialist could be cause for suspicion, according to Jorge Sorí "Sánchez has always authenticated his own work," says Sorí. "No one else is authorized to do it.")

If any Cuban agency is directly concerned with the traffic in fakes, it is the Fondo de Bienes Culturales, which rules on the authenticity of artworks awaiting export. Alejandro Alonso says that this institution wants "to prohibit the exportation of fakes, make sure they don't reenter the market, either here or abroad." But Cuban law doesn't provide for the seizure of forged paintings that are brought to the agency for expertise. "It would clearly be a good thing if it did," concedes Alonso. At present, the forgeries are simply returned to their owners, who remain free to try their luck elsewhere.

So far as Cernuda is concerned, declarations like Alonso's are evidence, at best, of the powerlessness of the cultural bureaucracy against the traffic's protectors. "It's well known to the artistic community in Cuba that they have a major problem with forgeries, and the ministry of culture may want to control or eliminate it," says Cernuda. "But they're not doing it right—they're not doing anything they should be doing." They are afraid, Cernuda charges, of opening a Pandora's box, "because the corruption is at a high level." None of the Cuban experts responded to allegations of high-level government corruption.

Ironically, as Alonso concedes, the Cuban government's own efforts to sell artworks for hard currency through its authorized export galleries are now being compromised by fakes. One leading collector says that he recently purchased two paintings purportedly by Tomás Sánchez through the Acacias gallery, and the gallery refused to take the works back after they were denounced by the artist as forgeries. Cernuda comments that the Acacias staff "have made mistakes that I know of regarding the authorship of some works. I know they've made mistakes with artists who left the country years ago, like Cundo Bermúdez [who moved to Puerto Rico in 1967], artists where they have no experts." But he doesn't believe the gallery knowingly sells fakes.

But it's also true, as Alonso says, that "it's not a question of pointing fingers at particular countries. Forgeries are made wherever there are unscrupulous people who have the means to do so." Juan Martínez says he has seen fakes made in Mexico City, Venezuela, and Florida, judging from the provenances that accompany them. Other sources report that high-quality forgeries are being made in Bogotá. This dispersion reflects the spread of the Cuban diaspora, suggests Martínez. It has taken root, he says, "wherever there are Cubans, and wherever Cuban artists have gone. When they have good academic training, as they did in Cuba, they have the potential to paint a forgery. For every one of their masters, there are three or four people who can paint ‘in the manner of.’" The situation will continue, observers say, until Cuba becomes an open society and the U.S. abandons its embargo of the island. The separation of the art market from crucial sources of documentation and expertise inevitably gives forgers an advantage over their prospective customers. And in the meantime, experienced people in the field advise, anyone seeking to buy Cuban art had best be very careful.

Mark Hunter is an award-winning journalist who lives in Paris. His most recent book, Un Américain au Front, was published by Stock last January. Additional research and translation by Jeanne Miserendino.

Photo credits: Faked certificate and fake Lam painting, courtesy SDO Wifredo Lam (3); photograph of Lou Laurin Lam, Antonio Ruizo Arago; photograph of protest in Coral Gables, Jeffrey Boan/Miami Herald; photograph of genuine Tomás Sánchez landscape, courtesy Christie's New York; photographs of the withdrawn Carreño and the genuine Patio Colonial Cubano, courtesy Christie's New York.

This article originally appeared in the November 1998 edition of ARTnews. Permission to reproduce this article was granted by ARTnews and by Mark Hunter.  This article is copyrighted ©1998 by Mark Hunter. All rights reserved.