Re: Delegación parlamentaria europea viajará a Cuba
pedro martori
Castro's Art Theft Puts Sotheby's on the Spot
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY For The WSJ
October 29, 2004; Page A15
Any art thief worth his salt knows that pinching a painting is less than half the job. Success comes only when the item is unloaded to a collector and the cash is safely in hand.
This is the tale of a painting by Spanish impressionist Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923). "A View of Malaga" belonged to a private collector in Havana. Part one of the story is the heist: Fidel Castro "appropriated" the work in 1961.
As for part two, it is alleged that the Cuban dictator sold it some years ago to an Italian who arranged for Sotheby's to put it on the auction block. Now, the pre-heist owner, the Cuban-American Fanjul Family Trust, wants restitution, or at least satisfaction. It has asked the State Department to investigate whether Title IV of the Helms-Burton Act, which authorizes the visa revocation of parties knowingly trafficking in stolen Cuban property, should apply.
Civilized society widely recognizes that Nazi loot is stolen property and ought to be returned to its rightful owner or family heirs. Indeed just two days ago, the FBI reportedly seized a painting from a Chicago art collector that authorities believe belongs to the heir of a Holocaust survivor living in California.
It is no great leap of logic to extend this principle to art expropriated by other tyrannies and passed in the shadows to collectors in exchange for dollars. In a just world, the collector would be regarded as an accessory to a despot who plunders his own country.
Yet Europe broadly applies the Act of State Doctrine -- which says that if a foreign power is recognized, then its domestic policies are not to be challenged in the courts, even if there seems to be a moral imperative to do so. That's why the Fanjul family has turned to Helms-Burton's Title IV as a way to put the art world on notice that this is stolen property and not fair game for dealers.
The painting in question was acquired in the 1930s or 1940s by Jose Gomez-Mena, who left his estate to his daughter Lilian Gomez-Mena (Mrs. Alfonso Fanjul). According to the trust's lawyers -- the Miami firm of Steel, Hector and Davis -- after the Castro regime issued an "expropriating decree, the Sorolla was taken to the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana."
The Fanjuls, having decamped to the U.S. to escape Castro's repression, tried to keep track of their property over the decades. In the mid-1980s the collection showed up in a Cuban traveling exhibition in Europe. After the demise of the Soviet Union, the family became concerned that Castro, desperate for foreign exchange, might try to sell the collection. In April 1993 the Fanjul family says it sent letters to a number of international art auction houses, including Sotheby's, to notify them of their ownership claim. In October 1993 the family put the paintings on the Art Loss Register. The London-based ALR's purpose is to make sure that stolen art does not turn up on the international art market.
Yet in April 1995, Blanca Pons-Sorolla, the great-granddaughter of the artist, received a request from Sotheby's to authenticate "A View of Malaga." The letter dated April 20, 1995, says that the auction house wished to include the painting in a June sale. Ms. Pons-Sorolla felt sure that the painting had come from Cuba and she alerted the Fanjul family.
A break in the case came when Shanker Singham, of Steel, Hector and Davis in Miami, plowing through related court documents, realized that there was a possible connection between a Sotheby's employee in charge of the European impressionist division and an Italian art dealer called Bruno Scaioli who specialized in collecting in Latin America.
The British art journalist Peter Watson made the same link in his 1997 book "Sotheby's: The Inside Story." According to Mr. Watson, in a piece titled "Castro Stole My Art" in last week's Times of London Sunday Magazine, "From documents leaked to me, it appeared that Scaioli . . . once had an arrangement to find art for the auction house in South America."
Mr. Singham hired art loss investigator Simon Hornby, who, posing as a broker for an interested collector, went to Italy to meet with Mr. Scaioli. The undercover work was slow and nerve-wracking. But on a second visit to Mr. Scaioli's apartment in July 2000, the sleuth says that he was shown a Sorolla. He asked if it was the "View of Harbor," another name for the painting in question. He was told it was.
In the same Times piece, Mr. Watson reports that during that meeting, "Scaioli had with him the catalogue of the Spanish exhibitions, where it said that the painting had once been in the Gomez-Mena collection. He confirmed that it had been authenticated by Blanca Pons-Sorolla, and said he had bought it from the Cuban authorities about eight years before."
Sotheby's says that it "put the Fanjul's lawyers in touch with the lawyers for the current owner in 1998." Mr. Singham says that is true and that the lawyer told him that Sotheby's held the painting "to his client's order between 1993 and 1995."
Sotheby's further points out that it "never did offer Port of Malaga at auction." It says that after almost a decade it "cannot reconstruct precisely what occurred. However, even if Sotheby's did consider including the painting at an auction in 1995, this is a very public process, together with the distribution of our catalogues to the Art Loss Register, and the Fanjuls would have had every opportunity to pursue whatever legal claim to the painting they believed they had."
The trouble with the court route in Europe, Mr. Singham reiterates, is the Act of State Doctrine. Previous efforts to recover the Gomez-Mena Collection have been discouraged by legal counsel because it is expected that the act would be applied. That's why he believes that Helms-Burton's Title IV is the best weapon to use against the alleged perpetrators. After all, a dictator's contempt for property rights ought to have consequences.
lavozdecubalibre.com
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Martí siempre condeno la tiranía:
"¿Del tirano?
Del tirano/
di todo, ¡di mas! y clava/
con furia de mano esclava/
sobre su oprobio al tirano".
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Posted on Fri, Oct. 29, 2004
Delegación parlamentaria europea viajará a Cuba
Associated Press
ROMA - Una delegación de diputados de Italia y otros países europeos se
propone viajar a Cuba para apoyar a la disidencia, según se anunció el
viernes en la clausura de un seminario sobre ese país antillano realizado
aquí.
La propuesta la presentó el vicepresidente de la Cámara de Diputados de
Italia, Publio Fiori, de la derechista Alianza Nacional.
Al seminario "Cuba y democracia" asistieron unos 50 representantes de la
disidencia cubana procedentes de Europa y Estados Unidos. El encuentro fue
organizado por la Internacional Demócrata de Centro.
La delegación solicitará visados para visitar la isla y entrevistarse con
representantes de la disidencia cubana, continuando así con la labor de la
IDC de dar a conocer a nivel internacional la situación que se vive en ese
país, dijeron los organizadores.
"Hablaremos con presos políticos, visitaremos las cárceles y nos reuniremos
con miembros de la oposición", dijo Fiori.
Explicó que el objetivo es "demostrarles nuestro apoyo y transmitirles el
mensaje de que Cuba no está sola en su lucha a favor de la libertad y los
derechos humanos porque el mundo democrático también está en contra del
régimen y las atrocidades de Fidel Castro".
El encuentro fue inaugurado el jueves por el presidente de la Cámara de
Diputados de Italia, Pier Ferdinando Casini, y el Secretario de Relaciones
Exteriores para América Latina, Mario Baccini.
http://www.miami.com/mld/elnuevo/10048967.htm
"Hemos de poner la justicia tan alta como las palmas" -José Martí
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