Custom Cargo.

SOMETIMES DEALING WITH AN AIRLINE CAN BE worse than getting unknown cargo into Havana. At least that's what Brian Collier learned after moving a sprawling art installation of small fragile objects and pieces of furniture from his studio in Buffalo, New York to Havana, Cuba.

In preparation for a recent Cuban art forum, he built a special crate to transport pieces safely. When he asked Costa Rican airline Lacsa about out whether he could haul it down to Havana on his scheduled flight from Toronto, he says, "I couldn't get an answer on size and weight."

Finally an airline representative told him to "just bring it" to the airport for his flight to Cuba. Once he arrived, he was told: "The box was twice as heavy as the weight limit." Caution be damned, Collier quickly set out to buy handbags to hold some of the pieces and reduce the heft of his handmade box so that he could get his work to Cuba. "I was a little upset to say the least," he says.

In Havana things could not have gone smoother. "They didn't even make me open the crate," explains Collier. It helped that organizers of the Cuban forum had done the paperwork correctly. "Dealing with Lacsa was a nightmare," he says. "I was expecting the difficulty to be in Havana but if it went as smooth as could be."