A Tribute to Humberto Calzada

"Every canvas is a letter home to a Havana that exists now only in memory and pigment."

WATCH: Calzada: Reconstructing Havana

The call came last week. My friend Humberto Calzada had died in Miami. I sat in my study, staring at the phone, thinking about paint-stained fingers and the way he'd squint at a canvas, seeing not what was there, but what should be there—what had been there, in a Havana frozen in 1959, preserved in memory like insects in amber.

Today marks three years since my father died. I still don't know where he's buried. Habeas Corpus indeed—where is the body? Where do we lay our grief when there's no grave to visit, no stone to touch? But Humberto's children, they got to say goodbye. They got to stand around his casket and remember out loud. They got what I never had.

So tonight, I do what I can. I give you his story.

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The Alchemy of Exile

Picture this: Miami, maybe 2010. I walk into Humberto's studio for the first time, and it's like stepping into a time machine. The walls breathe with colonial pinks and Caribbean blues. Architectural fragments float in oil—a balcony here, a doorway there, pieces of a puzzle that will never be completed because half the pieces are buried under fifty years of revolutionary rhetoric.

"This," he says, pointing to a canvas crowded with ornate facades, "was my grandmother's street."

Not is. Was. Always past tense with Humberto. Always mourning, always rebuilding.

We became friends immediately—that rare chemistry when you meet someone and think, "Ah, there you are. I've been looking for you." Within months, we were planning a documentary. Calzada: Reconstructing Havana. The title said everything: a man using memory and paint to rebuild a city that no longer existed.

The Architecture of Memory

In the film, there's a scene I'll never forget. Humberto sits at his easel with an old black-and-white photograph propped against his palette. His grandmother's house, captured sometime in the 1940s. He's painting it back to life, brush stroke by careful brush stroke, adding colors the photograph couldn't hold—the coral pink of the walls, the deep green of the shutters, the golden afternoon light that filtered through the royal palms.

"When I went back to Cuba in 2008," he told me, mixing ochre and titanium white, "I stood in front of this house. I couldn't go in—different people live there now, you know? But I didn't need to. I know every room, every corner, every crack in the ceiling where the rain used to come through."

The Press

His voice was soft, matter-of-fact. No bitterness, no anger. Just the quiet certainty of a man who had spent decades in conversation with ghosts.

This was Humberto's genius: he understood that exile isn't just about being separated from a place—it's about being separated from time. You can't go home because home isn't just somewhere else; it's somewhen else. It's 1959, and you're eight years old, and your mother is calling you in for dinner, and the revolution is still just rumors and radio static.

So he did what any artist worth his salt would do: he painted his way back. Canvas by canvas, street by street, memory by memory.

The Night Everything Made Sense

The premiere of Calzada: Reconstructing Havana was at a small theater in Miami. Humberto was there, of course, nervous as a schoolboy, straightening his tie every five minutes. Carmen, his beloved wife, radiant beside him. Their children, proud and slightly overwhelmed by seeing their father's story on the big screen.

And my father was there.

My father sat in the front row and watched his son's work projected in the dark. When the credits rolled and the lights came up, he turned to me with tears in his eyes and said, "Eduardo, I'm proud of you."

The Premiere

The Cuban Exile in Miami

With my wife Soledad, and my father Nelson Montes-Bradley

It was perfect. The film was good—hell, it was better than good. I'd found a brother in Humberto, learned more about love and loss and the strange alchemy of exile than any university could have taught me. And my father, for once, was proud of me.

Three years later, he was gone. No funeral, no graveside service, no final goodbye. Not even a phonecall. I found out the day after looking at my feed on Facebook. Fuck that! Another absence to paint around.

What Remains

Humberto painted for sixty years. Hundreds of canvases, thousands of brushstrokes, each one a small act of resurrection. He painted the Havana of his childhood not as nostalgia but as testimony. These buildings existed. These streets were real. These colors filled the sky at sunset, and children played in these doorways, and lovers met under these balconies.

When we moved from Miami to the north, I knew I'd miss him. What I didn't know was how much. We'd email sometimes, share pictures of new work, new grandchildren, the small celebrations and quiet griefs that make up a life in exile.

Now he's gone, and I'm left with what we always have after love: memory and whatever art we managed to make along the way.

A Tribute to Humberto Calzada

So here's what I can do, what I choose to do: tonight, I'm making Calzada: Reconstructing Havana free for everyone. If you want to understand what it means to love a place so much that you spend your life painting it back into existence, watch this film. If you want to see how an artist turns loss into beauty, exile into art, memory into something that will outlast us all, this is how it's done.

This is my tribute to Humberto Calzada: Cuban, American, painter, friend, brother in all the ways that matter. A man who understood that sometimes the only way to go home is to create it, brush stroke by brush stroke, until the canvas holds everything you remember about love.

In memory of Humberto Calzada (1944-2024) and on the third anniversary of my father's passing. Some bridges are built with steel and stone. Others are built with paint and memory.