Photo of the artist made by Rodolfo Martínez and who heads the article by Forbes magazine entitled: The smoke dream of Roberto Fabelo.
If we are talking about pairings, few have achieved as much prominence as the pieces that in the last three years Fabelo has dedicated to the Festival del Habano, specifically to the auction organized for it and whose principal beneficiary is the Public Health System of Cuba.
In 2018 Habanos S.A. auctioned at the event held in the Salón Canarias of the Meliá Habana Hotel three allegorical drawings of the Habano made by Fabelo. The event was part of the inaugural program of the Habano Week, which was sponsored by the Hotel Meliá Habana, Habanos S.A., and Cuba Ron, with the general direction of Regla Álvarez, manager of Casas Habanos and Fabelo’s manager Mario José Hernández. Aires de Fiesta was in charge of the decoration and setting, and Isacc Delgado was invited for the closing concert.
The three drawings were sold for a hammer price of eighty thousand dollars, a figure added to the subsequent auction, at the closing of the Festival, of a Cohiba humidor crowned with a sculpture also made by Fabelo, which combines wood and metals, and is based on the piece of 2012 titled Un poco de nosotros. This humidor, sold for 304.000 euros ( $ 408,000.00), was part of a set of seven, which in total raised almost one and a half million euros for the Cuban Health System.
Habanos as a topic, and the humidors has already become a prominent area of Fabelo's work. It is not by chance then that Forbes magazine dedicated, shortly before the Festival, an article entitled "The Smoke Dream of Roberto Fabelo", signed by Miguel Monfort. Photos of several of the collectors obsessed with his work are included, among them Jorge Pérez, Fred Schrader, and Luciano Méndez.
The text of Forbes describes the humidor auctioned in 2018 as a “monumental (...) piece, 5.2 ft. high, which will house about 600 Cohiba cigars of various vitolas. In his ash wreath live several of the usual characters of his fantasies: winged nymphs with the head of a bird, smokers of cigars, characters that show traditionality, his beloved dog with all his curiosity about what is coming, and next to them all the Fabelian universe condensed in the figure of a rhinoceros that observes us from above, with its powerful body resting on a fragile egg yolk.”