What's In Your Wallet
Cuban artist Alejandro Alarcón barred from promising NFT trading sites
When everything seemed to be going wrong, Cuban multimedia artist Alejandro Pablo Garcia Alarcón discovered a solution in an unlikely place: NFTs.
Artists like him have suffered a series of setbacks in recent years: the pandemic wreaked havoc on Cuba’s tourism industry, causing art sales to plummet. While American sanctions did not explicitly apply to art, they made it more difficult for Cubans to sell their works and it can be difficult to get featured in Cuban galleries for artists whose work can veer into political commentaries, such as Garcia Alarcón’s.
Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, are digital images that are registered on a blockchain and are typically purchased with cryptocurrencies. Because of the medium’s decentralized nature, they provide artists like Garcia Alarcón with a rare opportunity to profit from their art on an international stage with few speech restrictions.
“The freedom was the first thing that drew me to it,” said Garcia Alarcón, better known by his artist name Paolo De. “You can commercialize your work without using intermediaries or going through a filter.”
However, doors have begun to close for artists from Cuba and other sanctioned countries this year, as key NFT trading platforms have gradually blocked them from doing business on their platforms, often with little or no explanation.
According to Cuban NFT artist collectives, Garcia Alarcón is one of at least 30 Cuban artists whose profiles have been removed from at least two American-owned NFT trading sites, including the largest, OpenSea, and KnownOrigin.
An Associated Press email seeking comment was not returned.
Some of the biggest names in the Cuban digital art scene have been delisted, including Havana’s most popular interactive art space, Fábrica de Arte Cubano, and photographer Gabriel Guerra Bianchini, the first Cuban to auction off a piece as an NFT.
In March 2021, his work Hotel Habana 3/10, which consists of stacked photos of Havana’s old, classic buildings, made a splash in the local art scene. “404” now appears on his OpenSea page. This page has vanished.”
On its website, OpenSea boasts that it is “building an open digital economy” and that users can “trade their items freely”.
In April 2021, Garcia Alarcón began trading NFTs on OpenSea, with his first work serving as a political commentary on the controversial detention of protesting Cuban artists in January of that year. He made $200 from it and went on to sell about 20 more NFTs via the website.
Garcia Alarcón was once promoted as an artist to watch by OpenSea. However, he was unexpectedly locked out of his account last March.
“They sell you the idea of freedom, of being able to show your work, of not being censored,” Garcia Alarcón explained. “You use the platform to show what you can’t show in your home country, and then something like this happens.”
When an artist is removed from a platform, the art they sold is also removed. Although the NFT remains on the blockchain and is viewable on other NFT trading sites, artists say it is frequently viewed as a loss by collectors who are confused or want to display the art on more popular platforms.
Although OpenSea has not stated why it removed the Cuban artists’ work, it is likely due to the perceived risks of running afoul of US sanctions. In March, OpenSea told the cryptocurrency news site Decrypt that “we have a zero-tolerance policy for the use of our services by sanctioned individuals or entities, and people located in sanctioned countries,” in response to criticism for delisting Iranian artists earlier this year.
The penalties for violating sanctions can be severe; for example, in October, the US Treasury Department fined the cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex US$24 million for allowing traders to avoid American sanctions in places like Cuba, Syria, Iran, and Sudan.
Though the United States has imposed economic sanctions on Cuba for more than six decades, including bans on commercial products such as cigars and rum, many forms of Cuban art are exempt from the sanctions. However, in some cases, NFTs have become more of an investment vehicle, with NFTs selling for tens of millions of dollars during the 2021 boom.
For Gianni D’Alerta, a Cuban American who has spent his entire life in Miami and has never visited the island, the medium was “an opportunity to engage with my culture” and bridge a long-standing divide between Cubans on the island and in Miami.
He is the founder of NFTcuba.ART, a global collective of approximately 100 Cuban artists. Last week he received an email from OpenSea saying the NFTcuba.ART account was blocked “due to activity that goes against our terms of service”.
Artists claim they were never told explicitly why their accounts were deleted, and when D’Alerta asked for more information, OpenSea responded that it was “unable to disclose additional details,” according to emails obtained by the AP.
Some artists speculate that the trading platforms are acting cautiously, while others speculate that people who disagree with what certain artists have to say about Cuba may have created accounts to flag those artists’ profiles.
According to D’Alerta and other collective leaders, the bans have even extended to personal accounts of Cuban artists who do not live on the island.
Meanwhile, Cuban NFT leaders are concerned that de-platforming will have a long-term chilling effect on Cuban digital artists.
Purchasing NFTs is already risky due to recent volatility in the cryptocurrency market, as evidenced by the recent collapse of the popular cryptocurrency trading platform FTX and criminal charges filed against its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried.
According to D’Alerta, it could be viewed as even more of a risk for those purchasing from Cuban artists because the art could later disappear from the major platforms.
“It’s heartbreaking and unfortunate,” he says. “It’s another disappointment, you know. Another realization is that they aren’t a part of the global community.” ‘You can’t participate,’ basically says [NFT platforms].
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