ALEXANDRA OLSON
 ASSOCIATED PRESS

 HAVANA—Even among the salsa musicians and Santeria practitioners roaming around Havana's colonial Plaza de la Catedral, Manuel Mendive stands out.

 Emerging from the 18th-century cathedral in his typical African boubou robe of linen, his gray dreadlocks swept back in a ponytail, the 57-year-old sculptor and
 painter is as recognizable here as is his work.

 Many call him the island's foremost living artist. Art lovers in Cuba and abroad are fascinated with his brightly coloured sculptures and paintings, nearly all dedicated
 to Santeria, the Afro-Cuban belief system blending Roman Catholic saints and Yoruba deities.

 Mendive walks across the plaza toward a café, using the walking stick he has used ever since a bus ran over his leg. Settling down for a glass of juice, he wrinkles
 his nose at the photograph of a painting Cuban officials chose for an Internet auction last month.

 "Something is missing to integrate the golds. They stand out too much, and the painting looks cold," he says. "In the real painting, the blues are very blue, very violent. So are the pinks.''

 Mendive wants colour to be the first thing people notice about his work. "I want to capture people with the colours. Then gradually, they can discover my message,"
 he says.

 Born in a Havana slum in a wooden house his grandfather built, Mendive graduated from Cuba's prestigious San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in 1963.

 Over the last three decades, he has had more than 40 exhibits around the world — in France, Britain, Japan, Spain, Brazil, Mexico and the United States. The
 Museum of Modern Art in Paris and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., include his pieces in their collections.

 The painting he's studying at the cafe is Energias de la Naturaleza (Energies of Nature), which he did earlier this year. In it, a seated woman bows to receive a bowl
 of food from the Yoruba god of destiny, Eleggua, whom Santeria practitioners associate with the Catholic St. Anthony.

 "My discourse is always the same: Man with nature, man with his gods, man with good and evil. Man in life and man in death; from life springs death and from death
 springs life," he says.

 Santeria is his religion, inherited from his parents and grandparents before them. At the cathedral, he was celebrating the Day of St. Christopher, Havana's patron
 saint. In Santeria, St. Christopher is also Aggayu, the Yoruba god of land and protector of travellers.

 At his home in the town of Tapaste, just outside Havana, he surrounds himself with a menagerie of the creatures he paints: tropical fish, goats, peacocks.

 "And people," he adds. "People inspire me, too.''

 There is more tragedy and discordance in his older works.

 The 1967 piece Oggun depicts the Yoruban god of metal and tragedy sowing evil in the world. People murder each other in the nightmarish scene.

 Mendive paints and sculpts what he knows. But for inspiration, he has travelled outside Cuba, including to several African countries.