The tragic journey of a homeless Cuban artist and curator once dubbed ‘squirrel man'

CNN

4 days ago

On a warm June afternoon just over a year ago, the partially clothed body of a man bobbed to the surface of the Hudson River at a shuttered Manhattan marina, a macabre yet occasional springtime occurrence.
The body was 5-foot-8-inches tall and 130 pounds, but the New York City Medical Examiner's autopsy report said the 'actual weight and age cannot be discerned due to advanced decomposition.' Authorities had no idea who he was or how he had died; presumably another life on the margins tragically ended in a polluted New York City waterway.
The cause and manner of death were undetermined, according to the autopsy report. How he ended up in the river remains a mystery.
Months would pass before the body was identified, in November 2024, as Rewell Altunaga, 47, a Cuban artist and curator considered a pioneer of video game art in his country. He came to the US with his partner at the time, Naivy Perez, also an artist, about a decade earlier – with the promise of a scholarship at a master's of fine arts program he soon decided to not pursue. Their son, now 13, remained in Cuba with his maternal grandparents.
'This is utterly tragic,' Neil Leonard, a jazz saxophonist who is artistic director of the Interdisciplinary Arts Institute at Berklee College of Music in Boston, said of Altunaga's death. 'I didn't see this coming in any way whatsoever. If you had asked me years before he passed, 'Who are the artists you think would be at risk?' I would never think Rewell.'
Part of Altunaga's unraveling could have involved a community project to distribute 'survival kits' to homeless people he met on the street. The idea was hatched after he spent time with unhoused men near the Manhattan apartment he briefly shared with his ex, according to Perez. The spiral intensified when the homeless men introduced him to K2 – a cheap, synthetic marijuana made from a potent mix of herbs and chemicals, she said.
With many American cities struggling against a record wave of homelessness, a once-beloved art professor back in Cuba who exhibited and curated abroad and at Havana's famed art biennial soon became a fixture among the homeless of Harlem. He battled addiction and mental health issues, according to those who knew him. A New York tabloid dubbed him the 'squirrel man' after Altunaga allegedly attacked a reporter and photographer doing a story about him sleeping in a tree near the Hudson in 2022.
Those who knew him took exception with such a characterization.
'He's one of the most important Cuban artists in my opinion, but he's completely unknown because he didn't strive to make his work known like other artists have, who in my opinion aren't as good as him,' said a longtime friend, Julio Llopiz-Casal, a 41-year-old Cuban artist who now lives in Spain.
Altunaga would have turned 48 last Tuesday.
Instead, his ashes rest in a plain wooden box in the living room of a friend's apartment, which overlooks the bustling streets of the northernmost section of West Harlem near City College of New York – where he lived – and the river where his body washed ashore on June 17, 2024.
The year he died, homelessness in America soared to the highest level on record, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development reported. More than 770,000 people experienced homelessness in 2024, an 18% increase from 2023.
'This gentleman's journey is not unique,' said Mary Brosnahan, who for three decades led the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy and service organization. 'He obviously is very unique in his talents. But what a tragic ending for someone who had so much promise.'
Rewell Altunaga was born on July 15, 1977, in the central Cuban city and province of Camaguey. His father served in the military and later worked as an electrician. His mother for many years made floral wreaths for a funeral home. He was the middle of five children.
After studying painting, ceramics and photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in the town of Trinidad, Altunaga was a professor and later an assistant director at the Academy of Visual Arts in the city of Ciego de Avila – where he met Perez in the early 2000s. He was 25; she was 17.
'I was his student. That's how we met and how I fell in love. He spent about a year or so courting me until he finally convinced me,' Perez recalled.
'Rewell, more than anything, lived for art. It was what moved him 100 percent and he was always studying, making exhibitions, inventing projects.'
For nearly a decade, Altunaga became part of a legion of artists around the world who drew inspiration from video game elements, incorporating those elements into their artwork. He produced works based on such popular titles as 'Delta Force: Black Hawk Down – Team Sabre,' 'Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,' 'Kane & Lynch: Dead Men' and 'Arma 2.'
'As a kid, unaware or uninterested about the small and big dramas that were occupying the minds of the so-called grown-ups, I spent my time playing video games with my peers,' Altunaga – a year before arriving in the US – told GameScenes, which chronicles the intersection of contemporary art and video games. 'An entire generation of Cubans grew up in the small worlds of Mario, Contra, Duke, Doom, Quake and other games.'
Video games in Cuba – like the slow and state-controlled internet – are not available to everyone. Cubans, including white-collar professionals, doctors and teachers, make the equivalent of roughly $15 a month in Cuban pesos. Months before Altunaga moved to the US, the price of an hour of internet use on the island was more than $5.
'Altunaga first played video games on an illegally rented Nintendo that a neighbor had brought from the US (in 1980s Cuba, video games were considered a mode of capitalist alienation),' Rachel Price, an associate professor at Princeton University, wrote in her book, 'Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island.'
'He is part of the first, global generation of players, and is not the only Cuban artist making mods (modifications) and repurposed video games. He has, however, worked most consistently in the genre,' she wrote.
Price met Altunaga in Havana while she was researching her book, which published in 2015. He often lamented the limited scale of internet art on the island, she said.
'He was critical of the stagnation of certain aspects of Cuban aesthetic innovation,' she told CNN. 'He felt like Cuba had long been a leader in avant-garde innovations, and it was not doing much with the digital world and art. And he felt like that was sort of a failure.'
In 2013, Altunaga and Liz Munsell, now curator of contemporary art at The Jewish Museum in New York, curated an exhibition at the Tufts University Art Galleries. The exhibit, 'Cuban Virtualities,' explored how limited access to digital technology and the internet on the island 'necessitated an array of creative solutions from a generation of artists born largely during the 1970s and 1980s,' according to a university website.
'I remember him as incredibly vibrant and whip-smart and motivated and generous,' Munsell told CNN. 'Nothing that I knew about him would have ever prepared me for understanding what has happened to him.'
Oscar 'Duandy' Gomez Otazo, a childhood friend and writer in Cabaiguán, in central Cuba, remembered a younger Altunaga spending hours playing video games.
'He once told me, 'I'm not going to paint. I'm not going to be one of those artists who spend hours and hours in front of a canvas to create an image. The artist has to think with his head,'' his friend told CNN. 'That always stuck with me about him.'
Llopiz-Casal told CNN from his home in Madrid that he last saw Altunaga in Cuba shortly before his departure for the United States in 2014. Over drinks, they spent a long night talking in the predawn about art and his upcoming trip to study in America.
'I suspected he was not very comfortable about leaving,' Llopiz-Casal said. 'That last time we met he talked about destiny, that it was something he had to do, that for him there was uncertainty but that he was going to do it.'
Llopiz-Casal knew Altunaga a long time and he worried about how his friend's 'self-destructive' ways – he drank and partied hard – would play out abroad, especially in a country where illicit drugs are easily accessible compared to Cuba.
'We talked often about the need to learn English and that bothered him on some level,' Llopiz-Casal recalled. 'And over time he also seemed to go from being very enthusiastic about the master's program to resisting it. I think he knew that living in the US would put him in danger because of the alcohol and drugs.'
Gomez Otazo called Altunaga 'an expressive person but at times he would fall into periods of introspection.'
'He knew he had to completely change a way of life, customs and habits,' Gomez Otazo said. 'He might have come to recognize that he was not ready for the change.'
In 2014, after a brief stay in Miami, Altunaga and Perez moved to New York, living for about six months in the midtown Manhattan apartment of a friend. She worked for a time as a nanny before taking a job at a restaurant, according to Perez.
Altunaga was supposed to be learning English. Instead, he began spending time on the street and smoking K2 with a group of men in the neighborhood, she said. He came up with a plan to use art to raise funds to distribute survival kits for homeless people, with information on food pantries as well as medical and legal services.
Perez said she left Altunaga after he put something in her food or drink one day. She didn't know what it was but believed she had been drugged. 'I had a bad trip and when I came out of that state, I literally wanted to kill him,' she recalled. Perez moved uptown with another friend.
Altunaga continued spending time on the street, consuming drugs and eventually getting kicked out of his friend's apartment. He spent a few months with relatives in Miami before returning to New York. Then Perez let him stay with her for several months, she said, until the day he pulled a knife and threatened her. He broke furniture and slashed walls. 'I had never seen him become so violent,' she said.
'From that day on,' Perez added, 'he was completely out on the street.' It was early 2017.
The former artist became a regular on the streets of Harlem. He relied on occasional handouts of food, clothing and money from friends and workers at a local restaurant. He would be seen pawing through trash bins for containers with 5-cent deposits, pulling out cans and bottles and dropping them into clear plastic bags. Other times, while bingeing on K2 and other drugs, he would become abruptly and deeply paranoid, rambling incoherently about nameless people coming after him.
Sometimes friends let him use their phones to make calls. Perez got him a cell phone which he had for a time.
'I started to see he was in crisis,' said Gomez Otazo, who saved numerous emails his friend sent from the streets of New York. 'There were long periods of paranoia, of persecution he said he suffered.'
In nearly a decade spent mostly on the streets, Altunaga was treated for his mental health issues only once to her knowledge, according to Perez. Through a mutual friend, a research scientist, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Manhattan for about eight weeks. With medication, his conditioned improved. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, according to Perez and the psychiatric research scientist who helped get him admitted.
The two women put money together and rented him an apartment in the Bronx. Without regular treatment, however, Altunaga's small window of peace soon closed and he returned to the streets.
Altunaga had lost all interest in art and, at one point, smashed hard drives containing his life's work on a snow-covered street. 'Everything he had done in his career, he threw away,' Perez said. She took the damaged devices to a hardware technician who managed to recover most of the data. He began to blame his troubles on art.
He was arrested nearly 20 times since 2017, mostly on criminal mischief charges involving the breaking of store windows and other property damage, according to a law enforcement source. Most of the cases remain sealed.
In January 2019, he was arrested on criminal mischief charges after hurling a cinder block through the window of a Harlem sex shop and dragging out a Barack Obama mannequin clad in a Santa suit, according to media reports at the time. A witness told CNN affiliate WPIX Altunaga said he didn't like what the mannequin of the former president was saying to him.
In 2022, Altunaga was dubbed the homeless 'squirrel man' by the New York Post after assaulting a reporter and photographer working on a story about him sleeping on a tree near Riverbank State Park in Harlem. Charged with assault and criminal mischief, Altunaga was freed on supervised release at the request of a prosecutor, the newspaper reported.
'Single homeless men are considered the lowest on the sort of ladder of those who need or deserve help,' said Brosnahan, the homeless advocate. 'If you're a single male, you are afforded the least amount of support and help.'
Perez took issue with the characterization of Altunaga as the 'squirrel man.'
'New York City is no better now. Rewell's suffering became part of the media cycle, but his life did not improve, and neither did the conditions for others like him,' she said.
Last summer, after returning from a monthlong visit to see her family and their son in Cuba, Perez started looking for Altunaga to tell him about her trip. 'I walked for blocks and asked everyone and no one had seen him,' she said. In August, she filed a missing persons report. She spent much of the following month walking up and down Broadway showing people photos of Altunaga.
She then turned to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUS), a clearinghouse of databases with information on thousands of missing persons used by medical examiners, law enforcement and relatives of the missing. At first, she searched without success for people ranging in age from 30 to 60. She later expanded the search to up to 70 years old. She comes across the case of the body of a male found in the Hudson in June 2024. The descriptions of the weights and hair matched, as did the two-inch-long graying beard. So did the two shirts the man was wearing.
'At that moment I get this unexplainable feeling in my chest,' Perez said. 'I said, 'This is Rewell.''
Perez then contacted the New York City Medical Examiner's Office. She told them about the match on NamUS and said that in 2014 she had taken Altunaga to a city hospital. He was suffering from asthma symptoms and doctors ran a slew of medical tests on him.
On November 12, Perez received a call from the medical examiner's office.
'It was him,' she said.
'The family found the information on the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) and then contacted OCME, and we worked with them to use the information they provided to make the positive identification,' said an email from the medical examiner's office. 'OCME routinely posts unidentified and unclaimed persons on NamUs in efforts to identify all persons in our care. The NamUs resource has led to many positive identifications.'
A toxicology report detected cocaethylene, a compound created when the liver metabolizes cocaine in the presence of ethanol, which was also found in postmortem samples, according to the autopsy report. There were no signs of injuries or head trauma.
In December, Perez returned to Cuba to break the news to their and Altunaga's parents.
'I feel sad. I never got to meet him,' their son told her.
On New Year's Day, Perez wrote on social media: 'With immense pain today I can share with you that Rewell Altunaga has left the world we know… There are so many things I'd like to say and do in his memory but I simply haven't had the courage to dig deep into our memories. Just peeking in makes my pain flare up again. I have a feeling it'll never go away. I'll just get used to it.'
CNN's Mark Morales contributed to this report.
Ray Sanchez is a New York City-based CNN reporter who frequently encountered the subject of this story on the streets of his West Harlem neighborhood.