GG Herrera

María Herrera taught art to three decades of Havana schoolchildren and swears half the city's sign-painters once sat in her classroom. She paints the sea in oils every morning from the same spot on the Malecón, and plays every night on her building's shared balcony, where the games have run since before anyone can remember. She plays entirely by feel. No counting, no charts, and no visible interest in whether the feeling was correct. She offers to paint a picture for opponents she likes, and she means it: several of her regular rivals have a small piece of the Havana sea on a wall somewhere. The one thing she does aggressively is the cube. She turns it far more often than anybody expects of somebody so gentle about everything else, on nothing but the sense that the game has tilted, and she is right about half the time.