Elio Beltran started to paint with oils at age twelve (1941-42) in his native Cuba after receiving drawing instructions from Madame Matilde Single, a distinguished art professor from San Alejandro School of Art in Havana. Thereafter he worked individually to become a self-taught artist by creating original work to attend to some unexpected demand for painted designs on clothes at a very early age.

  The early beginning opened the road to years later being able to create award winning oil paintings with evocative compositions of scenery and people from Havana and surrounding towns in the harbor, all done from images stored in the memory as childhood impressions while growing up in Regla, the colorful town across the bay, all which was, in time, transformed into a strong base of inspiration during the years as an exile in the United States.

  Many images were recreated on canvas more than two decades later: The bay workers, and the magically charged city, Old Havana and its cobbled stone streets and the life of the late thirties, forties, and fifties came alive dreamlike in a collection of oils created strictly by memory and with deep inner feelings. Many of these works include scenes of Afro-Cuban culture and rituals witnessed as a child in the outskirts of his home town, just as other urban scenes that became strongly expressionistic in time besides being narrative and a part of the story of the memorable capital of Cuba. A number of the paintings are now part of museums and private collections.

  During recent years (2004-7) Elio Beltran has been producing new works for private commissions and for a major exhibition in Andalusia, Spain. Works for this exhibition are part of a series of work connecting the traditional cultures of Cuba and Spain, encompassing paintings from his Colors of Spain series, as well as the influences that the African culture brought to his native Cuba. He has moved his Englewood, New Jersey Studio to South Florida where he have had a number of individual exhibitions (1993, 2001, and a 2004 Cintas Foundation selective exhibition called “Four Visions” in Dade County. He has also been actively lecturing and presenting his book “Back to Cuba”.

  The Philips Frost Museum of Florida International University has acquired during the last few years (2003 and 2004) acquired his 1994 “Balseros” series, a group 14 of paintings to be added to “The Night of the exile”, a major oil painting, produced in 1988, and in the FIU Collection since 1998. most recently (2004), the CInats Foundation acquired the painting entitled "Nostalgia" painted in 1998 as a tribute to the late cuban master Daniel Serrá Badué.

His book entitled “BACK TO CUBA” (The Return of the Butterflies) collects the memoirs of life in Cuba, as a child and later on as a student on the pre-revolutionary period and the beginning of the revolutionary government, it also includes illustrations of some of the paintings that serve as backdrops to the story. The book was published by the Random House associate, Xlibris, in Philadelphia " Back to Cuba" also contains poetry inspired by his childhood in Cuba and also by life in the United States. (Hardcover ISBN 1-4010-9168-7 , Softcover ISBN 1-4010-9167-9)