Cuban Painter and Printmaker Luis Miguel Valdés Morales, Founder of La Siempre Habana, Dies

July 12, 2026

Cuban painter, printmaker, and sculptor Luis Miguel Valdés Morales died on the night of Monday, July 6, 2026, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where he had lived for more than three decades and where he founded his celebrated graphic arts workshop, La Siempre Habana. The news was confirmed on social media by poet Alex Fleites, filmmaker Juan Pin Vilar, and the Cuban Embassy in Mexico.

Born in Pinar del Río on February 12, 1949, Valdés Morales graduated in the third class of the National School of Art (ENA) in Havana. He was a founding member of the Higher Institute of Art (ISA), where he served as head of the Printmaking Department from 1976 to 1991 and achieved the highest teaching rank of Full Professor. During those years he supervised 58 thesis projects by artists who would go on to become central figures in Cuban visual arts, including Roberto Fabelo and William Carmona.

In 1983 he received a fellowship at the historic Atelier 17 in Paris, the workshop of printmaker Stanley William Hayter, where Pablo Picasso and Francisco Toledo also worked. There he discovered the computer as an artistic tool, and upon returning to Havana he founded the ISA's Computerized Graphics Laboratory, becoming a pioneer of digital art in Cuba.

He settled in Mexico in 1991, and in 2000, together with Mexican poet Cuitláhuac Rangel, founded the La Siempre Habana graphics workshop, first in Coyoacán and later in Cuernavaca, which became a top reference point on the Latin American printmaking scene. More than a hundred artists — Cuban, Mexican, and from other countries — worked at its presses, including José Luis Cuevas, Vicente Rojo, Kcho, Nelson Domínguez, Zaida del Río, José Bedia, and Tomás Sánchez.

His personal work returned persistently to the colonial architecture of Havana, a subject he explored for more than four decades across printmaking, woodcut, acrylic, and watercolor. In 2003, Cuba's Ministry of Culture awarded him the Medal for National Culture.