Tuesday, May 24, 2016

How I Feel About Making Art About Myself

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How I Feel About Making Art About Myself

by Lauren Purje on May 23, 2016

by Lauren Purje on May 23, 2016

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Will the Launch of ARCO Lisboa Perk Up Portugal's Sleepy Art Market?

Market

Will the Launch of ARCO Lisboa Perk Up Portugal's Sleepy Art Market?

Lorena Muñoz-Alonso, Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Rua Prata in Lisbon. Photo: Diego Delso via Wikimedia Commons.

Tomorrow, the first edition of ARCO Lisboa, the Portuguese outpost of Madrid's long-established art fair, will host its preview at Lisbon's historical Fábrica Nacional da Cordoaria.

Gathering just 45 galleries from 8 countries, ARCO Lisboa aims to be a so-called "boutique art fair," and thus vastly different from ARCO Madrid, which hosted over 224 galleries from 29 countries during its latest edition in February.

Yet, when the launch of the new fair was first announced last November, the news raised quite a few eyebrows. Portugal, which is only now slowly starting to recover from a deep economic crisis that plagued the country from 2010-2014, seemed like an unlikely location for any fair to branch out.

ARCO's new outpost, however, might not be such a big surprise for those in the know, for Lisbon has been a cultural destination for years, quietly hyped by many as the "new Berlin" or the "new Brussels."

Related: See the Top 10 Booths at ARCO Madrid 2016

The beautiful and sunny city attracts flocks of tourists all year round, and with its high-quality art museums (including the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, directed by Penelope Curtis, former director of London's Tate Britain), and an expanding network of commercial galleries and artist-run spaces, Lisbon's art scene has been building up over the last decade despite a persistent lack of financial means.

But is having a high tourism value and a vibrant artistic community enough to jump-start a slow art market? Will the arrival of ARCO in Lisbon have any impact at all? And will the fair survive its first edition? We spoke to people directly involved in the fair and with various members of the city's art scene to find out what they think.

Carlos Urroz. director of ARCO Madrid and ARCO Lisbon. Photo: Courtesy ARCO.

Carlos Urroz, director of ARCO Madrid and ARCO Lisboa. Photo: Courtesy ARCO.

Carlos Urroz, director of ARCO Madrid and ARCO Lisboa, spoke to artnet News about the motivations behind the launch of the Lisbon fair.

"ARCO Lisboa is being launched at a moment when the city is going through a good moment, hosting some of the best artists of the world. Lisbon was our best option to expand, and it is also the place where people want to be. A lot of people are buying second houses there and the city receives wealthy visitors," he said, stressing that Portugal has an "increasingly dynamic market."

Related: What Sold at ARCO Madrid 2016

Urroz also revealed that the idea for this fair had been in the works since 2012, but that it hadn't been implemented until now because of the difficult economic period that both Spain and Portugal were going through at that time. "A number of local initiatives didn't work out," he said, responding to the question of why it took a Spanish company to launch a local fair, rather than a Portuguese initiative.

“A number of collectors, curators, and other art professionals, who would probably not visit Lisbon otherwise, have confirmed they will attend the fair. The fair has made a great promotional effort on an international level, bringing over 100 guests as part of the VIP program, which invites collectors from 27 countries, museum directors, and curators," Urroz explained, making it clear that he wants the fair to become a catalysts for the Lisbon art scene and art market.

Pedro Maisterra and Belén Valbuena from the Madrid-based gallery MaisterraValbuena. Photo: Courtesy the gallery.

One of the galleries participating in this first edition is MaisterraValbuena, a young Spanish gallery that enjoys visibility on an international level, and a regular exhibitor at ARCO Madrid.

"We have decided to participate because we wanted to support ARCO. It's a moment of uncertainty and doubt, but we want to give it try together. We know the Portuguese scene, we are friends with local collectors and gallerists, and the country has top art collections and institutions, so we are sure the fair will generate a lot of interest," Pedro Maisterra and Belén Valbuena, founders and directors of the Madrid-based gallery, told artnet News.

"We know of a number of Spanish collectors who are looking forward to spending a few days in Lisbon, which is a city that everyone loves, and home to a great number of French and Brazilian expats. It's a city full of vitality and we think the fair might be a great tool to channel that energy towards contemporary art," they added.

Installation view of Renato Leotta's “Aventura" exhibition at Madragoa, Lisbon. Photo: Courtesy the gallery.

Matteo Consonni, meanwhile, is a young Italian dealer who's just opened a commercial gallery in Lisbon called Madragoa with partner Gonçalo Jesus, after spending five years in Turin as director of the Italian blue chip gallery Franco Noero.

"The art market in Portugal might be small but there are very good and serious collections here already. Surely in this particular moment, with the incredible attention that this country is creating abroad, there is the potential for the market to grow and develop, but not every place needs to be London or New York," he told artnet News.

"[Lisbon] is a city with enormous potential of attraction, with a limited number of galleries but a high level in the programming, with a vital and curious art scene, lower costs, a slower pace, that offers great possibilities of local production, well connected to the rest of the world by a good international airport, and with a lot of good artists." Consonni explained, speaking of his motivations to open a gallery there.

"The galleries are small in number, but there are colleagues who are bringing forward a wonderful discourse since years, such as Cristina Guerra, Galería Filomena Soares, Pedro Cera, Vera Cortês, and Murias Centeno. In terms of young galleries, we are happy to be part of this scene with colleagues such as Pedro Alfacinha, and waiting for the opening of a new space by Francisco Fino. Moreover, there are rumors of young galleries from abroad thinking of opening here," he said of the local gallery circuit.

In terms of the potential of the fair to shake things up, Consonni told arnet News: "ARCO can be one element that will make the market more dynamic here, but I also think it's the responsibility of all the galleries here to participate in this process and shape it with serious work throughout the whole year."

Pedro Gadanho, director of the MAAT museum in Lisbon. Photo: ©David Farran.

Pedro Gadanho, director of Lisbon's soon-to-be-opened Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), which launches in September, also spoke about the highly dynamic moment that the art scene in Lisbon is seeing.

"Although the Portuguese artistic scene is vibrant, it is well known only to a select group of curators and art professionals. There has been a deficit of Portuguese artists who are present at major art fairs, for example," he told artnet News.

"But with the work of a few great galleries, and the role of institutions such as Serralves and the upcoming MAAT, the knowledge of Portuguese art is on the rise, as is a bigger interaction with the international scene. With some relevant foreign artists and collectors moving in to Lisbon, we may be looking at a quick transformation of what has been a relatively peripheral scene," he added. "We want to be part of this transformational moment in which Lisbon is seen as a new hotspot for art, music, technological start-ups, and creativity in general."

But, when asked to point out the less flattering aspects of Portuguese culture, Gadanho didn't mince his words: "The last remnants of an established culture of bureaucracy, old school nepotism, and occasional lack of vision."

Installation view of Jacopo Miliani, A Slow Dance Without Name at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, 2016. Photo: Bruno Lopes, Courtesy Kunsthalle Lissabon.

Installation view of Jacopo Miliani's "A Slow Dance Without Name" at Kunsthalle Lissabon. Photo: Bruno Lopes, Courtesy Kunsthalle Lissabon.

Luis Silva, co-director of the acclaimed Lisbon-based non-profit art space Kuntshalle Lissabon, which opened in 2010, has witnessed the transformation of the local art scene from the front line.

"The scene in Lisbon is definitely gaining momentum, which is very exciting. New galleries have or are about to open, and new curatorial spaces have been developing programs and strategies which are committed to specific interests and points of view, avoiding a certain mainstream flatness, which could be identified as one of Lisbon's main criticisms in terms of contemporary art. Larger institutions such as Culturgest or Museu Coleção Berardo have also been developing a very strong temporary exhibitions program, and all these things combined create a very exciting landscape which wasn't at all the case when we created Kunsthalle Lissabon," Silva told artnet News.

"Lisbon is a very appealing city. The living costs are still very low, which means if you are getting your income from elsewhere and you move to Lisbon, you will have great living standards. Many people have indeed moved to Lisbon in the past couple of years, either from other places in Europe or from Latin America, so the scene is growing in numbers and in diversity, which is extremely exciting for us," he added.

"I do believe however that ARCO Lisboa can play an influential role, not immediately just by setting up shop in Lisbon, but in the long run, as it happened in Spain, in expanding the reach of private and corporate collecting," Silva said about the impact that the fair could have on the local market.

"Art fairs are part of the artistic ecosystem as much as museums, biennials, galleries, artist-run spaces, etc. And Lisbon needs one, of course. Lisbon has had other art fairs, with varying degrees of quality and relevance. There was life before ARCO Lisboa arrived, one should not forget that. But it's also true that having ARCO setting up a branch here can be a great opportunity to have a relevant art fair, given that they do possess the expertise and the knowledge on how to run a successful art fair," Silva added.

But what about the artists that live there? How is the gentrification process that is taking place in the city, which ARCO Lisboa could accelerate, affecting their own ecosystem?

Andre Romao, The illusion of anti-productivity and A state of permanent euphoria (ghosts) (2015) at Vera Cortes Art Agency, Lisbon. Photo: Bruno Lopes Courtesy of the artist and gallery.

André Romao and Pedro Barateiro are two successful young artists, who are very active in the Lisbon art scene. Besides their individual artistic careers, they were both part of a group of eight artists who ran the renowned space Parkour, which hosted exhibitions by (mainly) young Portuguese artists.

Starting in 2012, Parkour was in the same building that hosted the original Kunsthalle Lissabon and a number of artist studios, until in 2014 it was sold to be turned into luxury apartments. While Kunsthalle Lissabon relocated, Parkour folded.

"Lisbon has had a number art fairs before, but they always failed somehow to create something interesting for galleries and collectors. I don't know if Lisbon needed a fair, I don't think anyone needs any more fairs, the calendar is insane, but I do think that if ARCO Lisboa manages to create some sort of platform here, it may be important. I think everyone here is just waiting to see," Romao told artnet News.

"The economy of tourism, of foreign investment, and of real estate that has created the bubble we are living in right now, with extremely high prices pushing Lisboners out of the city center, and giving space to hotels and Airbnb's. The country was under a long financial crisis fabricated by central European economies in order to save French and German banks. And what do we get in return? An art fair and tourists who come to enjoy themselves in the cheapest—yet fun and sunny—best 'new' spot in Western Europe," Barateiro, in a more critical tone, told artnet News.

"I don't take for granted any sort of investment that is taking place in Portugal, it's all necessary. But the country's financial system is still recovering, and the measurements should be taken on a much deeper level," he added.

The inaugural edition of ARCO Lisboa will take place at the Fábrica Nacional da Cordoaria, Lisbon, from May 26-29, 2016.

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Lorena Muñoz-Alonso

Google’s New Art Camera

In the Air

Google’s New Art Camera

May 24, 2016

The Google Cultural Institute unveiled its newest development last week, a camera designed to help museums digitize their collections by taking extremely hi-res images of individual art works. It’s called the Art Camera.

The camera is said to be extremely fast and user-friendly, requiring only that it be set up opposite a work of art on a wall (the technology does not yet work on 3D pieces) and shown the edges of the work. The camera takes care of the rest, moving on its own to record its subject inch by inch in less than an hour, a process that used to take a team of hired specialists hours to complete. Producing images of over a billion pixels (gigapixels), the Art Camera is capable of revealing details otherwise invisible to the naked eye.
Google has now made 20 of these state-of-the-art machines, and plans to loan them to museums in exchange for their allowing the Google Art Project (under the umbrella of the Cultural Institute) to archive the images the cameras collect. Any non-profit museum is eligible to use the camera, so long as it has 50 or more images already up on the Art Project platform.
This digitization of artworks is nothing new, and the Google Art Project itself has been around since 2011, when it launched with the goal of providing a platform for institutions all over the world to show their collections in ultra-high quality digital form. To date, it has more than 1,000 participating institutions, and provides over 6 million images, and has been praised for its democratizing dissemination of museum-owned art, allowing art-lovers, students, and researchers all over the world to marvel in the details of works they might never have the means to visit. Moreover, the project is making it possible for artworks on loan, in storage, or undergoing conservation to remain digitally accessible.
But the quality and ease of use afforded by the Art Camera also moves us one step closer to downside of the Art Project’s more-real-than-real imagery becoming the new norm for representing art. It’s easy to imagine a time, probably soon, when any museum but also any gallery or even Instagrammer has access to something like the Art Camera, and we all come to expect hyper-vivid experiences of art on our screens and in our VR headsets — to the point where we don’t see much value in visiting the real thing.
This idea, of course, is always countered by the argument that great art needs to be experienced, meaning in person. But as museums continue to steer into the skid of digitization — devoting more resources to mobile-device content and staging increasingly “sharable” programming, and finding themselves overrun by crowds of selfie-takers and audio-guided tourists — that personal experience with art is getting harder to come by. It’s tempting to wonder whether their likely embrace of the Art Camera might be another small step toward the end.

—Taylor Dafoe (@tdafoe)

IMI. Saiba se a sua rua está mais cara

Jornal i

Sónia Peres Pinto18 horas atrás

A qualidade da gestão em Portugal

$A agência de notação financeira Moody’s não acredita que Portugal consiga cumprir a meta estabelecida de 2,2% para o défice orçamental, devido ao fraco crescimento da economia.Numa nota divulgada aos seus clientes e citada pelo Jornal de Negócios, a Moody’s escreve que “o crescimento económico não vai dar grande apoio à consolidação orçamental planeada e à redução do elevado rácio de dívida pública.”A agência, que este mês manteve o “rating” de Portugal em Ba2, com uma perspectiva “estável”, sublinha que o crescimento permanece moderado depois de anos de reformas estruturais, “que não estão a mostrar resultados na forma de uma economia mais resistente e mais forte”.Para a Moody’s, vinca ainda o Negócios, o elevado nível de endividamento público e privado representa um constrangimento para as perspetivas de crescimento do país e para as avaliações da dívida nacional.OJE$

Moody’s antecipa défice de 3% para Portugal

Os coeficientes de localização, um dos critérios para calcular o imposto a pagar, foram atualizados à escala nacional. Há casos em que as ruas foram valorizadas e isso aconteceu sobretudo nas grandes cidades do litoral. Mas este cenário não é igual em todo o país

Sabe se está a pagar mais imposto municipal sobre imóveis (IMI)? É possível, se a sua casa foi adquirida há mais de três anos e desde que não tenha pedido às Finanças para atualizarem o valor do imóvel para efeitos fiscais. Isto porque a Autoridade Tributária não está a refletir os novos coeficientes de localização nos cálculos do IMI, tal como não tem refletido o envelhecimento das casas nem o preço por metro quadrado. O alerta é feito pela Associação Portuguesa para a Defesa do Consumidor (DECO), que chama ainda a atenção para o facto de esse pedido de reavaliação ser gratuito e passar a ter efeitos no valor a pagar no ano seguinte. Isso significa que, se fizer o pedido este ano, pode vir a pagar menos já em 2017.

A associação critica ainda o silêncio do Ministério das Finanças, que não explica o motivo da falta de atualização dos dados que influenciam o cálculo do valor patrimonial tributário. “Nenhum responsável do ministério, agora liderado por Mário Centeno, explica por que razão não é atualizada uma variável tão simples como a idade do imóvel. Todas as casas envelhecem anualmente, mas nem por isso os seus proprietários beneficiam com a desvalorização que resulta do avanço da idade do imóvel. E o IMI poderia baixar só por essa razão”, diz a DECO.

A este problema há ainda que somar uma outra novidade. Os coeficientes de localização, que também entram no cálculo do imposto, foram atualizados à escala nacional – até aqui, o valor era fixado pela autarquia. E isso teve como consequência a valorização de algumas ruas, principalmente nas grandes cidades do litoral. Mas há casos em que o valor permaneceu inalterado ou sofreu mesmo uma redução.

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MoBu Light - Gestão financeira

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Revolucione a sua gestão de finanças pessoais e finalmente coloque o dinheiro do seu lado. Enquanto outras aplicações…

Obter a aplicação

Esta situação leva a associação a tecer duras críticas. De acordo com a mesma, “desconhecem-se os critérios que levaram à valorização de algumas zonas do país que não sofreram qualquer intervenção”. E dá como exemplo determinadas artérias de Lisboa, que passaram a ser taxadas pelo coeficiente máximo de 3,5%, sem que tenham sofrido nos últimos 15 anos sem qualquer obra de valorização.

Sem automatismos

Outro entrave diz respeito à falta de atualização, de forma automática, do valor de base dos prédios edificados, que em termos práticos corresponde ao preço do metro quadrado para construção. Esse valor é tabelado anualmente em Diário da República. Desde 2010 que assistimos ao mesmo valor: 603 euros por metro quadrado. “Tem permanecido sem alterações desde então. Poderia ter reduzido o valor do imposto a pagar nos anos seguintes. Mas só a quem pediu, desde então, uma atualização do valor tributário da sua casa. Ou para quem entretanto comprou ou herdou uma habitação”, salienta a associação.

Mas este cenário não é igual para todos. Algumas famílias com filhos a cargo já verificaram que o valor cobrado este ano desceu ligeiramente. No entanto, esta redução deve-se a uma decisão que alguns municípios tomaram para favorecerem as famílias com dependentes, atribuindo-lhes um desconto até 20% no IMI, de acordo com o número de filhos. Ou seja, esta decisão não deve ser confundida com qualquer atualização do valor tributário da casa, que cabe às Finanças promover.

Atualização nem sempre compensa

Para não estar a pagar mais imposto do que devia, a associação sugere que faça a simulação para ver se realmente o fisco está a cobrar o valor justo. “Se, até aqui, a generalidade dos pedidos de avaliação culminava na redução do imposto a pagar, agora, com a atualização dos coeficientes de localização, tem mesmo de simular para confirmar se compensa”, alerta a DECO.

A explicação é simples: a subida do coeficiente pode provocar um agravamento do imposto, anulando a poupança eventualmente obtida com a revisão da idade e do preço do metro quadrado. “Se é o seu caso, é melhor deixar ficar tudo como está”, diz.

No entanto, se o coeficiente de localização se manteve ou até baixou, tem bons motivos para pedir a atualização do imóvel nas Finanças. “A casa está mais velha, o preço do metro quadrado baixou e a sua rua não foi valorizada”, salienta.

A DECO considera que é incompreensível que o fisco continue sem atualizar de forma automática as variáveis que influenciam o cálculo do IMI. “Se já era difícil de aceitar que a idade do imóvel e o preço do metro quadrado não fossem revistos por iniciativa do fisco, a indignação é agora aumentada, após a revisão dos coeficientes de localização, que só terão impacto no IMI se os proprietários pedirem a atualização do valor tributário”, acrescentando ainda que estranha que “a revisão trianual dos valores patrimoniais, com base na desvalorização da moeda, já seja feita de forma automática – com resultados sempre a favor do Estado”, conclui.

From Cuba to Miami by Providence and a Homemade Boat

U.S.

From Cuba to Miami by Providence and a Homemade Boat

By LIZETTE ALVAREZMAY 23, 2016

MIAMI — The sign from God and the Virgin Mary came near the end of their perilous, sun-scorched journey from Cuba to Florida: A dozen or so dolphins swam up to their home-built, overloaded sailboat, dipping in and out of the water, guiding them, they felt, toward a reimagined future.

“It’s true we are blessed,” Rolando Quintero Ferrer, 27, one of the 12 passengers on the boat, said on his video recording of the voyage. “What a beautiful thing. Nobody will get close to us now.”

The omen proved true. After five days of being stuffed in the boat like cigarettes in a hard pack, including 24 hours on an uninhabited islet, the men sailed right up to a dock in Tavernier in the Florida Keys. It was 4:20 a.m. They scrambled out, pointed to the parking signs in English, hollered and wept. They then took out a cellphone and, knowing they would be welcomed, dialed 911, a trick gleaned from American television.

“Look at this great water,” Yosvanys Chinea, a 42-year-old carpenter, joked as he held up a bottle the police had handed him when they arrived. “It’s already curing my parasites, something that, for me, hadn’t happened in 42 years.”

Since President Obama renewed diplomatic ties with the island in December 2014, Cuba has undergone significant change. Airplane travel between Miami and Havana is booming. Cubans are expanding private microbusinesses with the help of stateside relatives. One thing that has not changed, however, is the desperation of Cubans to set sail in rickety boats for the United States — a sign that fears are increasing, not decreasing, as Cubans worry that protections, not available to other immigrants, offering them legal status are in danger of being rescinded.

Since Oct. 1, more than 3,500 Cubans have either made it to the shores of the United States, allowing them to stay here legally, or been picked up at sea by the Coast Guard and sent home. The numbers arriving this year may reach numbers not seen since the balsero exodus of the 1990s.

They come for two reasons. Life in Cuba remains incalculably difficult, especially for those outside the hustle and bustle of Havana. Freedom of expression remains severely limited, and wages can be as low as $16 to $22 a month.

They are also motivated by panic. They believe that Congress is ready to repeal the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, which gives Cubans a unique privilege — automatic residency one year and a day after their arrival in the country. Attempts at a repeal have so far been unsuccessful, but anti-immigrant sentiment in Washington makes it a possibility, especially because Cubans are now viewed here as economic, rather than political, migrants.

Coast Guard officials said Cubans had become more aggressive in trying to evade capture. They at times jump in the sea or refuse to board the Coast Guard cutters. On Friday, as the Coast Guard approached, 19 Cubans scrambled off their boat and swam to a lighthouse five miles off the Florida Keys; they eventually climbed down and will most likely be taken right back to Cuba. Two months ago, six Cubans on a boat had gunshot wounds and said they had been attacked in the Florida Straits. But all the bullets managed to miss major organs, prompting skepticism.

Three Cuban refugees, from left, Yosvanys Chinea, Alierky Perez and Brayan Sanchez, looked out over Deering Channel on May 6 outside the Shrine of Our Lady of Charity in Miami. Credit Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

“We have had cases in the past of self-inflicted gunshots, and there is more noncompliance,” Petty Officer Mark Barney of the Coast Guard said. “Often they continue going and refuse to let us get them off the boats. It is a safety issue. There are cases all the time where people are found in the water, alive, dead, migrants gone missing.”

This group of Cubans said they, too, had a plan to dodge the authorities. “We would all jump in the water and try to swim away,” Mr. Quintero said.

But first they had to get off the island, no small task for a group of Cubans from Florencia, a hilly, tobacco-producing area close to the center of the island. The group formed slowly, in an underground game of who-wants-out and who-can-you-trust.

It is illegal and dangerous to leave Cuba by boat, so many kept their plans hidden even from relatives, a reflection of the secrecy surrounding these journeys, which often take months or years to organize and require money, ingenuity and courage.

They formed a motley group: several farmers, a carpenter, a tattoo artist, a funeral home worker and a D.J. who doubled as a distributor of the paquetes — the black market recordings of American and Latin American movies, television and news shows that are pirated off satellite dishes.

Asael Veloso, a 34-year-old farmer, tried to leave three years ago. He sold everything and hitched a ride with another bunch of so-called balseros. But their raft was captured eight hours from Cuba, and he returned home with less than he had left with.

Everyone contributed. Mr. Chinea, the carpenter, and Edel Sánchez spent 20 days building the sailboat in a tobacco-drying house from scraps of wood. The small boat was designed for six people and ended up sailing with 12. A couple helped sail and navigate. A few had money or muscle power. Some had connections.

Getting the sailboat to the shore was tricky. The men managed to find a tractor to pull the boat, camouflaged by palm fronds, to the coast when the weather looked good. But the tractor could not haul the boat up a steep hill, so in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, the men had to find a second tractor to push it.

They finally arrived on the shore, at Punta de Judas, on April 17 at 6 a.m. On board, they had 31 gallons of water, juice, powdered milk, cans of sweetened condensed milk, and piles of crackers and nuts. They wore floppy hats and long sleeves, and used blankets to cover themselves from the sun. They had made six oars from tree branches.

Alierky Perez, left, and Raul Rodríguez tried on new shoes on May 4 at the Migration and Refugee Services offices in Miami run by the Conference of Catholic Bishops. Credit Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

Most important, they had three smartphones. Mr. Quintero had jury-rigged a computer battery to charge the phones during the journey. This meant the men had something invaluable — GPS to guide them to Florida.

Inside the sailboat, they layered tightly. Although most Cubans disdain religion, the men did not hesitate to ask Dios for his blessings.

“I made promises to everyone: to God, to La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre,” Mr. Quintero said, referring to the patron saint of balseros.

They would need them. For two terrifying days, they could not clear Cuban waters.

“We left with the current and the wind against us,” said Onelio Rodríguez, a baby-faced 26-year-old farmer. “But God is beautiful.”

They slept, smoked cigarettes, played Latin music, bantered about girlfriends and children, poked fun at one another — especially at the man who got severely seasick the moment he boarded and scarcely moved during the five-day journey — and ate nuts and crackers. They also argued — over who would row, who could sleep at night, who was hogging space.

“We laughed at our own misery, which is how we survive in Cuba,” said Mr. Sánchez, 43, a farmer. On the boat, he joked that he already knew what his first American wish would be. He never again wanted to see “crackers, nuts or Cuba.”

Soon after clearing Cuba, they landed on rocky Cayo Anguilla, an uninhabited Bahamian islet, to get some rest. They hid their boat in the brush and quickly discovered they had company. Another group of Cubans was there, too, and in worse shape, so the men shared their food and water, and even caught a fish they cooked in seawater. They had a sleepless night. The islet was covered in opossum-size rats.

“All night we had to fight them off,” Mr. Rodríguez said. “One walked across me while I slept.”

The next day they carried the boat back to shore, shimmied an American flag up the mast and sailed. The wind died, and they worried. But, Mr. Quintero said, “God was just trying to protect us.”

Onelio Rodríguez peering out the window at the rain this month at the Migration and Refugee Services offices in Miami. Credit Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

Luck had been on their side; they had not seen the Coast Guard or hit a storm, which can doom these crossings. That was when the dolphins greeted them, and their optimism swelled. “Vamos a coronar,” Mr. Veloso said, describing their arrival and the cold beer that awaited them.

The GPS flashed that they were 18 miles from the Florida Keys. The men started to row in the darkness. Finally, they spotted a sea wall along a beach in Tavernier and spied a dock. They sailed to it and pulled out the phone.

Police officers showed up and the Cubans took photos with them, unfurling their American flag.

The next morning they were whisked to the Migration and Refugee Services offices run by the Conference of Catholic Bishops. The center fills out paperwork for arriving Cubans and, for those without relatives, feeds and puts them up in motels until they can be relocated to other states. Cuban migrants and refugees have been resettled around the country for decades so no one area bears the economic burden of helping them start new lives.

The Quality Inn in Doral, west of Miami, felt close to heaven for the men: air-conditioning, television with dozens of channels, more eggs and meat than they had seen in forever.

Half of the group would soon be destined for Las Vegas, the other half for Austin, Tex., where they will look for work. The center’s resettlement programs have a 70 to 90 percent success rate in finding jobs, said Juan F. Lopez, an associate director for the refugee services group.

“This is a country of laws, but we say, ‘Let’s look at this from the humane standpoint,’” Mr. Lopez said. “We can’t afford people getting here and going straight on public assistance.”

Nearly two weeks after their arrival, the men sat on a sea wall in Miami’s Biscayne Bay, where they paid tribute at a shrine to La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre.

Mr. Chinea, the carpenter, thought about his wife and two sons back in Florencia. His eyes welling up, he gave thanks. Now, he said, he could help them.

“We are so lucky to have arrived,” he said. “I have more here in eight days than I ever had in my 42 years in Cuba.”

His five years of waiting and planning had paid off. “What you have here is a nest of hope,” he said. “What you have there is a nest of scorpions.”

Correction: May 23, 2016
Earlier versions of two picture captions with this article misidentified where Alierky Perez and Raul Rodríguez were trying on shoes and where Onelio Rodríguez was looking out a window. They were at Migration and Refugee Services of the Conference of Catholic Bishops, not at Catholic Charities Legal Services.

VANTAG galeria

Tuesday, May 24, 2016