The recent donation of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros to six international museums is a milestone that confirms the role that employers and philanthropists play in a field of dwindling budgets such as culture. The Art Basel Miami Beach fair is a good opportunity to meet many of these collectors of Latin American origin. They, they say, move because of their artistic passion. And for the will to render justice to creators forgotten until not so long ago by the great cultural institutions.
the appointment is in an old gym, near the modern design district of Miami, under the mandatory sun of justice that shines in the Latin capital of the United States. On the facade of this building of industrial airs a film of unknown title is projected. The film is starring wealthy members of Cuban society on the eve of the revolution. Some of the descendants of those anonymous faces, reunited after successive exiles throughout the American geography, are in the reception that takes place in the interior. We are in the headquarters of the foundation that the great collector Ella Fontanals-Cisneros has in Miami. It is called CIFO, a name that inverts its compound surname, in which Catalan and Canarian origins are mixed. Not counting those of his ex-husband, the owner of the Venezuelan Pepsi, whom he met during his exile in Caracas. There he grew up after leaving his native Cuba.
Each December, when the Art Basel Miami Beach fair starts, this vaguely aged woman, dressed in a sports suit and jacket, opens the doors of the place and hangs a handful of works from her collection, consisting of a total of of 3,200 pieces. On this occasion, the honor is of three great figures of Cuban abstraction: Loló Soldevilla, Sandu Darié and Carmen Herrera. Dodging geometric canvases, the collector moves away from the bustle and begins to remember how he met Herrera when he had not yet sold a single painting. "I thought it would be a young girl," he smiles. "Actually, I was 87 years old."
Son of Cubans who was born in Buenos Aires, grew up in Colombia and settled in Miami in 1968, Jorge Pérez is today one of the richest men in the United States thanks to his real estate empire. From his office in Villa Cristina, a mansion on the edge of the sea in the neighborhood of Coconut Grove, which usually opens once a year, during the week of art in Miami, in a busy brunch, he states emphatically: "Latin American art had been for decades mistreated. Until not long ago, the works of the greatest masters were sold for a handful of cents. When I talked about certain artists to the curators of the biggest museums, they would answer me: 'Who?'
