In 1980, Cano staged Ten Thousand Eight Hundred and Sixty-Five, a powerful, groundbreaking exhibit recalling the number of Cubans who had flocked to the Peruvian Embassy in Havana the previous year and sparked the Mariel boatlift.

''It was art for art's sake,'' says painter Arturo Rodríguez, who participated with an installation of paper cut-out figures representing embassy guards and those who drowned at sea trying to reach U.S. shores.

FOUND HER PASSION

A physics and chemistry graduate of the University of Havana who tried following in her father's footsteps but became unhappy working in laboratories, Cano found her passion for art and collecting when sugar magnate Julio Lobo gave her a job in his Museo Napoleónico in pre-Castro Havana.

''He had the most amazing letters and memorabilia from Napoleon,'' she remembers. ``Even a tooth! He got it from Napoleon's doctor, who lived in Santiago de Cuba.''

The memories of that mythical Havana of her youth and her sadness over the lack of democratic change in Cuba inspires her art, which has a medieval flair.

In her images, girls in hoop dresses cradle white doves and stand waiting before the wrought-iron grillwork and stained-glass windows of Havana. Young women float in palm-studded landscapes and walk on a high wire draped above mountains surrounded by still lifes of the bounty of Cuban soil: bananas, pineapples, mangoes. Some of the Madonna-like young women in Cano's paintings hold their children as they flee on rafts through shark-infested waters. One of them is being pulled -- to safety? to heaven? -- by an angel.

The stately pink house with the columns Cano repeatedly recalls in her paintings is the one in which she was born and grew up, the one her parents rented in Havana's exclusive El Vedado neighborhood. In a photograph a relative took during a visit to Cuba, it looks sad and deteriorated.

''Everyone asks me why I don't paint the Everglades, and maybe I will someday, but right now I'm still painting Cuba,'' says Cano, who began drawing and painting in 1993 while recuperating from injuries suffered in a car accident. (She had taken painting lessons as a child at Lyceum del Vedado with legendary artist Domingo Ravenet.)

Her Little Havana two-story is also beloved, a storehouse for her life history and art.

ARTIST SON

In between abstract works by Cuban icons Cundo Bermúdez and Carlos Alfonzo, among many other masters, and the acclaimed puppetry of her artist son, Pablo Cano, roost her paintings. Although they come in all sizes, miniatures are her signature, and she paints on any surface that captures her fancy. She has even painted on cloth, then cut a pattern and made herself a dress from her art. She also writes and illustrates children's books that feature a girl named Isabel, who is a lot like her daughter, an MDC librarian.

Table tops and cabinets are filled with Cano's projects -- a collection of giclées of her works inside cigar boxes; a round, nutshell-shaped box that opens to reveal a set of her ``Words of Wisdom.''

Inside little boxes and other creative containers, she places inspirational aphorisms penned on decorative cardboard tiles she paints with soft, earthy colors: ''Silence is sometimes the best choice of words.'' ``Distance yourself from problems that are beyond your control.''

Such words of wisdom would have served her well in the late 1980s when she was on the board of the Cuban Museum, and the institution was torn apart by the issue of whether to exhibit art from artists who remained on the island or had not broken publicly with the regime.

The controversy led to a pipe-bombing and the museum's eventual closing, a memory that still pains Cano.

''They were all her friends, and she did not want to take sides in the political debate,'' Kohen says of the museum board. ``She was for Cuba, for art, and she didn't make all those kinds of [political] decisions.''

Adds Young: ``The stress was incredible. I remember her coming back from the meetings exhausted, pained. It was heartbreaking to see the tension going on. The museum was something people cared about so strongly.''

But Cano's courtly demeanor -- ''She's a real lady, she knows where all the bones are buried, but she's a diplomat,'' Kohen says -- helped her survive the turmoil, find refuge in her art and family and move on to new causes.

On Thursday, she spoke at a Miami City Hall meeting to support the expansion of MDC's InterAmerican campus in her neighborhood. While some of her neighbors oppose the project because of its potential to bring more traffic to the area, Cano thinks an educational institution with the historical pedigree of MDC is worth supporting.

''A college campus is an enhancement to the neighborhood, and the college has promised to build a park,'' she says. ``People can walk their dogs and have a beautiful view.''

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